Food safety

The Sri Lankan public is justifiably worried over food safety. The ongoing controversy over coconut oil has brought to the surface long-simmering concerns over food safety, its handling and labelling as well as lack of comprehensive institutional and legal safeguards. Policymakers, who have traditionally focused more on food security than safety, now have to pivot urgently to deal with these public concerns but so far they seem to be floundering.

As with many other issues, it is difficult to focus discourse beyond blame to understand the systemic and structural issues at play. Research from around the world shows food safety results from the actions or inactions of a wide variety of stakeholders, including farmers, food handlers and distributors, food manufacturers, food service operators, consumers, regulators, scientists, educators, and the media. The behaviour of these stakeholders is often shaped by their awareness of food safety hazards and their capacity (technical or financial) to apply proper food safety practices, as well as by rules and incentives in place to encourage such practices.

In developing countries, food safety has been hampered by two main groups of factors. First, weak empirical knowledge (i.e., a lack of good quality data) regarding the country-level incidence of foodborne diseases, the economic costs of unsafe food, and the efficacy of domestic food safety interventions means that policymakers and researchers often do not know the extent of the problem in their country.

Second, as being seen in Sri Lanka, institutional challenges, such as fragmented food value chains and policies, have made it difficult to establish comprehensive, cohesive programs to address food safety issues across the board.

A World Bank report released in 2018 on food safety issues uses the term “food safety lifecycle” to describe how the burden of unsafe food changes alongside economic development. At the traditional stage of the food safety lifecycle (characterised by consumption of starchy staple foods and policies focused on food availability and affordability), food production practices are fairly effective at controlling food-borne hazards, because they mostly stem from poor hygiene practices and limited access to clean water and proper sanitation facilities. Therefore, at this stage, demand and incentives for food safety tend to be low.

As food systems modernise and incomes increase, however, countries reach the transitional stage of the food life cycle. At this stage, food safety hazards become broader, as consumers’ dietary preferences shift rapidly and populations become more urbanised. At this stage, countries also increase food imports, opening consumers up to new foodborne hazards.

Governmental regulatory bodies and systems, as well as emerging private sector actors, can become overwhelmed in this scenario of rapidly increasing and changing food safety risks, and food safety concerns tend to increase faster than the ability of existing tools to address those challenges. Sri Lanka appears to have reached this point and an exasperated public are demanding greater accountability.

Blaming one institution at this point is unrealistic but quick action is needed. What would be more progressive is for the line ministries and departments to look at legal and resource gaps and work to close them in a timely and transparent manner. Unfortunately these efforts need to continue long after the issue has faded from public eye and policy consistency is a challenge the Government has struggled to beat.