No escape from food law’s unholy mess
It's been some months since the government announced its intention to sort out the confusion created by the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, which is a classic case of a well-intentioned law failing the implementation test simply because no one had mulled over the ways it needs to be implemented. And because the subject is food, all of us end up carrying the burden of the consequences of the shoddy Act that no one seems to be ready to refurbish.
The law affects a critical building block of the nation – its health and nutrition – and yet it is so insufficient that India is being harangued by Canada because its canola oil exporters have to stop calling their product "canola oil", in order for it to be allowed into India, just because the 2006 Act, which has mindlessly appended a listing of food products dredged out of the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act of 1955, doesn't recognise canola oil. Nor does it accept the existence (and rising demand for) gluten-free bread. How can bread be gluten-free, demanded a befuddled inspector from an importer who has never been asked this question in his life! And mayonnaise? It doesn't even know about it, so there are no product standards for it.
The law doesn’t allow vegetable fat in chocolates (a common occurrence and accepted internationally); it has no standards for antibiotic residues in chicken; it lays downs that all wines must be described as "fermented grape juice" on the label and provide an expiry date, it insists on five per cent salt content in the brine in which table olives are packaged (the global standard in a world moving away from excessive salt consumption is one per cent) ... such ludicrous examples can fill up this page. Yet, the government hasn't found the time to revisit the law, which has become the biggest impediment to entrepreneurial activity in the food and nutrition sectors.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), the supreme authority on all matters concerning the Act, is like a general without an army. Its chief has been proclaiming to the world that the FSSAI has registered more than three million food business operators, but there's little it can do without an effective and efficient monitoring network in place.
It cannot, for instance, physically verify if the oil in which your neighbourhood tikkiwallah cooks your favourite tea-time snack is releasing cancer-causing chemicals because of repeated frying, or if the slaughter houses from where we get our supplies of mutton and chicken follow even the basic health and hygiene standards. True, India is the world's second largest exporter of beef (even though it doesn't allow beef imports!), and it couldn't have happened if the animals were slaughtered in appalling conditions, but no one ensures that the same hygiene standards must apply to abbatoirs across the country.
To implement the standards laid down by the Act, the FSSAI requires a national network of labs certified by the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL), but it is woefully under-equipped and, despite a generous budgetary allocation, it has been busy outsourcing the work to private agencies. Combine this infrastructure handicapped by a minuscule number of authorised labs with the complicated system of sampling laid down in the rules, and you have a time bomb that is ticking away.
Take the case of pasta. The sampling rules require laboratories to pick up a packet for each shape and production batch from a container of pasta that has landed at a port. You don’t have to be a Michelin three-star chef to know the ingredients that go into making pasta and the production technique don't change, whether it's a spaghetti or a penne, or whether it was made yesterday and today. But our officials love the letter of the law, so, as an importer was explaining to me, he has to spend six lakh rupees on tests for consignment of ten lakh rupees. So, the next time you complain about your pasta being too expensive, remember, there’s an Act that is in dire need of an overhaul.