More imported foods to be banned

Harmony Agere
The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe said Government should expedite adoption of the Consumer Protection Bill to deal with issues of product quality.

The banning of beverages, Dragon energy drink and Twizza soft drink, has drawn attention to the broader issue of the country’s food production and importation processes as more food items are believed to be circumventing import and health standards.
The Ministry of Health and Child Care recently banned Dragon and Twizza for contravening health and importation procedures. Indications are that there are more products in the country’s shops that fall short of set standards.
Sources say many food items sold locally could comprome public health.
While most of the suspected items are imports, local producers are also understood to be dribbling past the statutes guarding against sub-standard products.
Government and consumer watchdogs argue that producers are not, as required by law, labeling their products adequately.
Investigations have found that nutrition content and ingredients labelled on some products are not consistent with the actual make-up of the contents, a situation which has provoked the Government crackdown.
While he would not name the products under investigation, director of Environmental Health Services in the Health Ministry Mr Goldberg Tendai Mangwadu told The Sunday Mail Extra that: “We are also investigating more food stuffs and there is a similar letter (banning) the Twizza soft drink. A lot of food items are entering the country through undesignated points.”
How these smuggled goods are finding their way into major and respectable retail shops remains a mystery and underhand dealings involving public officials are being blamed.
The Consumer Council of Zimbabwe said Government should expedite adoption of the Consumer Protection Bill to deal with issues of product quality.
“We had received complaints … and we are happy that appropriate authorities have now acted upon the matter so that public health is ensured,” said CCZ executive director Ms Rosemary Siyachitema.
“When we were sitting in meetings with the food advisory board we had such issues (sub-standard food items) being raised regularly. There are strong fears that manufacturers are circumventing standards and are cutting corners to avoid penalties for their substandard goods.”
One theory is that some producers are either omitting certain ingredients or replacing them with unapproved ones to reduce production costs.
The lower production costs allow them to price their products cheaply to beat competition.
These omissions and substitutions of approved ingredients are not mentioned on the product packaging, creating the impression that everything is above board.
“There is an issue with the labelling of ingredients and the nutrition levels carried in these products. This is why we are appealing to Government to expedite the adoption of the Consumer Protection Act which outlines how products are to labelled and packaged,” added Ms Siyachitema.
Experts blame porous borders and lack of mechanisms to monitor the quality of local and imported foodstuffs.
Buy Zimbabwe chief economist Mr Kipson Gundani said the country should put in place robust sanitary and phytosanitary measurers (SPS) to curb the scourge of sub-standard food items.
“One of our big problems is that we do not have sound SPS mechanisms to monitor the quality of products entering the country. We are failing to monitor the quality and standards of food stuffs that we buy from other countries.
“If you remember well, the chickens from Brazil were once an issue with some people alleging that the chickens were being injected with dubious liquids to preserve them.”
Confederation of Zimbabwe Retailers president Mr Denford Mutashu echoed this, saying banning products which are already in supermarkets results in loss on part of business people.
“We are appealing to Government to put in place such checks so that there are limited cases of this nature because banning always results in loss.

“There are more products, even the reputable ones which do not have the same quality as the way they are labelled and packaged. The Government should move swiftly to correct that.”
However, some activists and distributors have disputed the notion that imported products are sub-standard. They say the banning of imported products is being pushed by local producers afraid of competition.
Some also aver that cheap imports help keep prices competitive.
“This is nothing else but a ploy to protect big fish in the local industry because they can no longer charge those exorbitant prices,” said a local businessman. “Products should compete, if they (local producers) want fair competition they should thrive to produce goods with a competitive price. It has been misrepresented to the nation that imports are killing local business, what is killing business is lack of a competitive pricing model.”
Mr Gundani vehemently disputed this.
“There is a misnomer that price correction is being caused by imported products, it is affected by market forces of demand and supply,” the Buy Zimbabwe official said. “It is also not true that imports are generally cheaper because people do not usually compare like for like. In Zimbabwe most of our products are organic and those imported are GMO so the prices are bound to be different.
“Also, by using the US dollar Zimbabwe has become a source of foreign currency for regional countries that is why you see that the country has become a highly favourable export destination for other countries even at a discount.”
Ms Siyachitema said maintaining a balance between competitive prices and promoting local industry was tricky.
“The dilemma that we have now is that we want prices to be cheaper while they also retain the required standards. We want a fair price competition but the problem is that local manufacturers often incur a higher cost of production more than their regional peers which make locally manufactured goods a bit expensive. But fair price is always good for the consumers.”
In the Mid-Term Fiscal Policy Review, Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa said over-reliance on imports was unrelated to production of un-competitively priced goods.
He said cheap and low quality imports were creating an uneven playing field and suppressing full recovery of several local firms.
According to statistics from ZimTrade, more than 60 percent of foodstuffs in Zimbabwe’s supermarkets are imports.
Researchers say food imports have been surpassing the US$1 billion mark each year since 2012, contributing to a trade deficit of US$3,6 billion.