The government has to strictly enforce quality checks on food imports if the country is to stop being flooded by sub-standard products.
The Ministry of Public Health believes 80 percent of food imports are expired or poor quality, while the environment protection department in Kabul Municipality puts this figure at 70 percent.
The government has to strictly enforce quality checks on food imports if the country is to stop being flooded by sub-standard products.
The Ministry of Public Health believes 80 percent of food imports are expired or poor quality, while the environment protection department in Kabul Municipality puts this figure at 70 percent. Adulterated foods are a major health concern.
The Afghan National Standards Authority (ANSA), set up in 2009, blames the government’s free market policies. Deputy Director Mujibul Rahman Khatir says the country was not ready to embrace the free market. “We did not consider our society and economy and took to the free market without adequate preparation.”
ANSA has not been able to post officials at the border and customs posts. It has installed machines to check the quality of oil imports at the dry ports including Hairatan, Torghondai, Sherkhan and Nimroz. “There are no laboratories at the ports to screen foodstuff, medicines, construction material or chemicals,” he admits.
ANSA has standards for 495 items in 13 sectors, but checking the enforcement is a challenge. There is rampant corruption at the border. Sometimes traders bring samples for testing to ANSA in Kabul, but these may not always match consignments that have been imported. Khatir says, “They get a letter of credit based on the sample but don’t import all materials according to sample.”
However, the Ministry of Public Health denies the system is corrupted. Samples of food stuff are not carried by traders, says Amir Mohammad Zaker Nasimi, the head of the alimentary immunity department. “Traders themselves don’t bring. It is our representatives in the provinces that send them. We take a sample and send it to the laboratory for analysis,” he says.
However, Nasimi did not deny that most food stuff is imported illegally into the country. “We don’t have the infrastructure to patrol the long land borders,” he confides. “Many traders import poor quality goods through smuggling networks,” he adds.
Evading scrutiny
Lutfullah Rashed, spokesperson for the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock insists substandard food items are smuggled, and there are mobile teams of inspectors whose job is to check on the quality of food items stocked by retail and wholesale traders.
How come adulterated and sub-standard foodstuffs slip past these multiple agencies tasked with maintaining quality control? Khatir, ANSA’s deputy director, expresses helplessness. “Substandard foodstuff is sold and there is no one to prevent it,” he laments. Nasimi from the Ministry of Public Health says roughly half the food imports are not screened. “We test to see if they meet the food standards and we reject if they don’t,” he says. According to him, 35,387 kg of dressed chicken, 400 million chicken eggs and 20,751 live chicken imports failed to meet the quality standards and were rejected in the current year. Nasimi adds that ANSA’s standards are not according to international rules.
Sayed Edris Tokhi, head of health in the Kabul Municipality, blames the availability of poor quality and expired foodstuff in the market for many illnesses affecting people. He says the municipality conducts food inspections twice a year, but considering the scale of the problem, he thinks checks should be twice a month. “We have confiscated 365,000 kg of expired materials from 5,600 shops and destroyed them between Dec 31, 2014, and Jan 1, 2016,” he says.
He clarifies that his department is not responsible for screening the quality of materials but it is looking for expired foodstuff.
Ajmal Hamid Adulrahimzai, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Finance, insists nothing can be imported without the required documentation.
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