The War Against Counterfeit Medicine: My Story

Chapter 15 - Focusing on Food

237 CHAPTER 15 FOCUSINGONFOOD Ensuring the safety and quality of food products in Nigeria is one of the key responsibilities of NAFDAC. The Agency works towards the fulfillment of this mandate through the regulation and control of local production, importation, exportation, manufacture, storage, advertisement and distribution of food products. Ensuring national food safety for a country as vast in land mass (924,000km2 ) and population (150 million people) as Nigeria is a challenging task. It is even more challenging given that Nigeria is still a developing country with a large proportion of the population still illiterate. We work to achieve our mandate through immediate, medium- and long-term strategies. Immediate Strategies These are plans that were introduced between 2001 and 2003 and have become standard practices in NAFDAC. They include: Registration of Food Products Manufactured or processed food products for distribution and consumption in Nigeria, whether locally produced or imported must first be registered in Nigeria. Before food manufactured locally is registered, NAFDAC inspects the production factory to ensure that it is GMP compliant. The food is screened in the laboratory to ensure that it is safe and of good quality. We ensure that what is stated on the label is what is contained in the product and that the product does not contain any banned or extraneous material. As in the case for drugs, we carry out routine surveillance of food production factories in Nigeria to ensure continued compliance with international standards. At ports of entry, we carry out random sampling of food products to ensure continued compliance with stipulated standards. Food production factories outside the country are also blacklisted if they are found to be producing unwholesome food, or if they seriously contravene our guidelines. After the global Melamine crisis of 2008 (when tainted milk resulted in a number of deaths), NAFDAC issued new guidelines requiring that all milk products from India or China be re-certified by our independent analysts in those countries before they are exported to Nigeria. 238 The War Against Counterfeit Medicine Development of Regulations and Registration Processes: Guidelines, SOPs and Regulations NAFDAC developed Guidelines, SOPs and Regulations for food and food products. The food SOPs aid us in ensuring uniformity and continuity in the assessment and certification of food products. The food regulations cover such categories as Sugar and Sugar Products Regulations, Pet Foods Regulations, Pre-packaged Food Labelling Regulations, Food Additives Regulations, Food Products (Advertisements) Regulations, Food Grade (Table or Cooking) Salt Regulations, Food Fortification With Vitamin A Regulations, Processed Food Registration Regulations, Milk and Dairy Products Regulations, Marketing of Infant and Young Children’s Food and Other Designated Products (Registration, Sales, etc.) Regulations. Staff Training, Development and Empowerment of Stakeholders We identified the need to sensitise, educate and empower the various stakeholders to better understand NAFDAC’s food regulatory procedures and guidance, in order to foster a culture of compliance. We organised training for all stakeholders involved in food production. Notable among them are fast-food restaurants, flour millers and bakers, farmers and grain merchants, producers of salt, sugar and vegetable oil, and producers of beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic), water and juices. In 2002, the Agency organised a workshop to sensitise the food and beverage industry on a new directive that required them to add expiry dates to food packaging and indicate the percentage of alcohol content in alcoholic beverages. We thereafter wrote to all alcoholic beverage manufacturers to effect this directive (Appendix 22) and published a public alert notice (Appendix 23). We benefited from the support of major international bodies such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Standards and Trade Development Facility (STDF), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Trade Organization (WTO). These organisations provided opportunities for capacity building through the training and development of NAFDAC staff, both within and outside Nigeria. _____________ Focusing on Food____ __ __ _______ _ 239 Medium-Term Strategies The medium-term plans, which began in 2003 and ran through to 2007, were developed to enable us to achieve a paradigm shift from supervisory regulation to self-regulation by the industry. They include programmes that would engender cooperation and collaboration amongst various arms of government involved in food safety and hygienic practices. They also include development of tools to enable consumers to become foot soldiers for NAFDAC in all the nooks and crannies...