Ghana celebrates first food safety week

Vice President Aliu Mahama on Monday said it was unacceptable that Ghanaians continually strived to meet standards of consumers abroad while they paid little attention to the products they produced for consumption in the country.

He, therefore, tasked the relevant ministries, district assemblies and agencies responsible for ensuring safe food to collaborate and devise acceptable standards to improve the production, haulage, processing, packaging and marketing of food to ensure that Ghanaians did not suffer from food-borne diseases.

Vice President Mahama, who was launching the first National Food Safety Week in Accra, noted that about 70 per cent of the economic cost of health problems in Ghana had been attributed to environmentally-related diseases because of the circumstances under which "we store, market, prepare and consume our food".

He said the Ministry of Health recently reported that there had been 17,499 cases of diarrhoea, 1,781 cases of typhoid fever and 3,000 cases of cholera in Accra alone in 1999.

The World Health Organization (WHO) also said unsafe food, a source of food borne diseases, had an annual fatality rate of 2.2 million people; 1.8 million of which were children, Vice President Mahama said.

He said "there was a direct relationship between the food we ate, our health and the economy," and it was, therefore, government's responsibility to ensure food security by making it available, affordable, sufficient and safe.

The government, he noted, would equip and strengthen the Food and Drugs Board (FDB) and the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) to play their roles of protecting the people from the production and sale of unwholesome food.

Vice President Mahama said the existing laws governing food production and processing should be enforced to protect the citizens from deliberate and reckless acts, which endangered their lives and cost the nation dearly.

He also called for the education and exhortation of food producers and sellers to provide safe food for good health. The week is being observed under the theme: "Safe Food For Good Health, A Responsibility Of All." It is under the auspices of the Food and Drugs Board, UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and other partners.

Vice President Mahama said all Ghanaian as consumers should show active interest and concern in food safety matters, be it local or imported. He said government was encouraging the private sector to invest in haulage, processing, storage and marketing to improve the quality of food and the places for marketing them.

Ghana as a signatory to international conventions and treaties of organisations such as the World Trade Organization, WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, was obliged to upgrade her national food safety programmes, he said.

"This will enable us to offer wholesome food to consumers domestically and to improve confidence in our food products exported to other parts of the world."

Prof Agyemang Badu Akosa, Director- General of the Ghana Health Service, called on metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies to ban all vegetable sellers, who displayed their produce on the ground.

He also urged the assemblies to concentrate on environmental sanitation in the market places since most foods were contaminated from the markets because of the environment in which they were sold. "Food vendors also need to be monitored to ensure that they did not produce unwholesome foods for their customers," he said.

Major Courage Quashigah, Minister of Food and Agriculture, said the country could not attain its desired food security unless food was properly handled devoid of all forms of contamination. "Our market places are the main sources of contaminations due to the filth in which the sellers sell their produce".

Kyeremanteng Agyarko, Chief Executive of the FDB, in a welcoming address said a recent study in Ghana had demonstrated that up to 60,000 individuals sold an estimated ?48m worth of food on the streets of Accra alone. The study found that serious food security risks existed in food offered for sale in the market place, he said

"The risks include contamination of raw materials with pathogenic bacteria pesticide residues, myco-toxins and heavy metals." Agyarko said the effect of consuming unsafe food was not only implicated in health conditions but also had a spillover effect on economic performance.