To keep players in the food-handling and export business up to date with changes regarding food safety, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning to undertake a number of sensitization programmes across the region.
Word of this has come from Carmen Booker, a representative of the FDA based in Puerto Rico with responsibility for the Caribbean.
Her comments came on Friday during a presentation at a roundtable on food safety hosted by the Caribbean Export Development Agency (CEDA). The event, which was attended by a number of CARIFORUM organizations involved in food safety, was held at Accra Beach Hotel.
Booker told the participants that a number of new rules and regulations under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) were to be released “soon” and the FDA would be holding seminars around the region, starting with Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, in an effort to discuss those rules.
Saying that they were hoping to start the sensitization programme in September, Booker cautioned that depending on the outcome of the upcoming American presidential elections, those rules under the FSMA could either be altered or abolished.
“The current White House is interested in produce standards . . . . If we do get a new president in November, basically all the work that has been done on FSMA could potentially either be on hold or a new president could repeal FSMA,” she said.
Giving information on the various sections under the current FSMA, Booker said that for the past three years the FDA had been working on “international capacity building” in an effort to improve laboratories in the region and Latin America.
“In the FDA we believe that the more we can do to help foreign governments build their capacity to establish a food safety [network] in their country, the better it will be with our imports,” she said. (MM)
