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African governments promoting coordinated approach to food safety issues

02 May 2011

Across the African continent, the growing importance of promoting a coordinated national and regional approach to ensuring food safety is gaining recognition. In West Africa, the government of Nigeria has formed ‘a multi-disciplinary National Food Safety Management Committee that will be responsible for food safety and quality control measures’. This follows frequent cases of Nigerian food exports being rejected at the point of entry to overseas markets on health or quality grounds. The aim is to ensure that Nigerian food and agricultural products increasingly meet international standards so that producers can take advantage of available trade opportunities. The initiative follows a conference supported by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) on the Hazard and Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) process.

Across the continent, work is under way in the East African Community to harmonise food safety standards. It is hoped that closer regional harmonisation of standards will help to restrict the volume of poor quality food in circulation, while at the same time making trade easier, by promoting recognition of common standards by all member states.

Editorial comment

In an emerging era of duty-free trade, effectively getting to grips with SPS and food standards issues will be vital to the promotion of both inter- and intra-regional trade. This is not simply a technical issue of standards, but also has important economic dimensions. By moving towards common regional standards, economies of scale can be gained in making the necessary investment in standards compliance. Regional markets can then become a platform for the penetration of international markets.

This can, however, be a double-edged sword. If the primary orientation is towards meeting standards applied on overseas markets, with regional standards being harmonised at this level, then this can create obstacles to the participation of small-scale producers or producers in less developed countries, which may have more limited capacities for the management of compliance-certification processes. For example, harmonisation of SACU dairy standards to EU equivalent levels, while opening up overseas markets for dairy products from South African companies, may close the SACU market to neighbouring regional producers, at the same time internally raising the costs of participation in dairy production to such an extent that small-scale farmers are driven out of commercial production.

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