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Balancing food safety and regional trade in the Eastern and Southern Africa

31 March 2012

COMESA is proposing to establish an early warning system for contaminated grain to enhance food safety and facilitate regional trade in grains. This is to be accompanied by the establishment of mutually recognised national quality assurance certification schemes. With hundreds of people in Kenya having fallen ill with aflatoxin poisoning and some of these poisonings having proved fatal, strengthening food safety control systems is seen as vital to facilitating the regional grain trade. Underpinning the new mutual recognition scheme are efforts to harmonise sampling and laboratory procedures in food safety analysis across the region. According to a COMESA food science and trade expert, ‘individual member states are expected to come up with an action plan towards achieving a common standard in food safety testing.’

These efforts need to be seen against the background of a report from the East African Grain Council (EAGC) outlining ‘the high quality thresholds, tedious documentation and open corruption at official border crossing points’, which are held to be ‘blocking movements of cheap foodstuff from surplus areas to deficit regions’ across the EAC. This finding emerged from surveys conducted at selected border crossing points in January 2012. These controls were fuelling informal cross-border trade, it was maintained. Estimates suggest that there has been a 71% increase in illicit cross-border trade in recent months, involving substantial tonnages of maize and sorghum.

Kenyan government officials argued that while ‘every effort has been made to ease flow of grains from neighbouring countries’, the government authorities ‘can never compromise quality standards’ (e.g. a moisture content of 13.5%, appropriate grain size and the relevant certificate of origin). However, traders complained that even where all these requirements were fulfilled, a 2-day delay still occurred while the Kenya Plant Inspectorate Service issued the phytosanitary certificate. According to the EAGC, this gives rise to a Kenyan maize price which is the highest in the EAC region.

Editorial comment

Early warning systems for contaminated grain will only work if implemented as part of broader food safety policies that include full traceability. Only on the basis of traceability can alert warnings be acted upon.

Looking beyond the issue of early warning systems, harmonising standards and promoting mutual recognition of quality certification is clearly necessary to facilitate trade. Yet here again member governments face financing and technical constraints in operationalising regional commitments. This may delay the early realisation of an effective regional food safety assurance system (for example along the lines of the COMESA-wide commodity certification scheme, known as the COMESA Green Pass).

Within the EAC, where a customs union is nominally in place, the establishment and enforcement of common food safety and food quality standards would appear to be essential prerequisites for the functioning of a single EAC market. The EAGC surveys suggest an urgent need to fast-track activities in this area across the relevant government departments within the EAC.

Clearly the private sector potentially has a major role to play alongside relevant government departments. Experience of collaboration elsewhere in Africa would appear to be relevant: in Namibia, for example, stakeholder representatives from accountable multi-stakeholder bodies, such as the Namibian Agronomic Board, work alongside government officials in managing the grain trade within a customs union.

In tackling issues of trade facilitation, a holistic approach will be required, tackling individual issues within a coherent framework which mobilises necessary financial and technical resources where needed. The simplification of procedures and moves towards one-stop border posts in the wider COMESA region will also be a part of this. However, corruption and non-transparent behaviour remain a major problem that governments need to consider how to address.

In addition, there is a need to tackle issues such as aflatoxin poisoning at their origins, by setting in place mechanisms to address critical hazard points ‘from farm to fork’, rather than seeking to deal with the consequences for trade. This would probably prove more effective in the long term in avoiding trade disruptions.

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