HACCP Academy Nigeria, a food safety consulting firm that operates across four continents, has called for the need to take food safety seriously, stressing that people are dying every day due to high blood pressure, stroke, and cancer, and that lots of these issues emanate from what people consume.
The Principal Partner/Executive Director for HACCP, Dr. James Olawale Marsh, made this call while speaking with journalists on the forthcoming World Food Safety Day, which is being celebrated worldwide on June 7 with the theme ‘Food Standards Save Lives.
Food safety has become a fundamental public health concern and an area of priority for consumers, hoteliers, retailers, manufacturers, and regulators as a result of changes in global patterns of food production, international trade, technology, public expectations for health protection, and many other factors.
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As a result of these, HACCP provides consultation on food safety and quality management systems, training, auditing management systems, validating manufacturing processes, and designing and implementing process control systems, to meet increasing human resource requirements for food safety and quality management professionals in the agriculture and the entire food sectors.
Marsh disclosed that he was so excited when he saw the theme, pointing out that despite the fact that there are standards in Nigeria, regulators hardly enforce them, except when issues come up that they start to run around to save lives, adding that the food chain starts from the farms to the table, but farmers are hardly sensitized on safety.
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He called on the government to work on how to uphold standards by ordering regulators to enforce and make sure that the set standards are strictly followed, adding that another thing to look into is the mode of transportation: frozen food shouldn’t be transported at the back of taxis nor at ambient temperature, since it needs to be transported frozen.
