FSSA implementation is biggest challenge, points out Gaur at Food summit

India Food Industry Summit 2011, UBM India’s unique offering for this year - a post-exhibition conference - held here on Wednesday, saw different stakeholders of the food industry deliberating on different challenges that the new Food Safety and Standards Act (FSSA), 2006, was likely to meet in the coming days.Offering his point of view on the subject, FSSAI CEO and interim chairman V N Gaur said that though the task of drafting the new law and regulations was a complicated procedure involving a number of tasks, data compilation and deliberations, but the biggest challenge now was to facilitate a smoother implementation process.He informed, “Most of the states have moved successfully with respect to the implementation of the new Act, but there are some state governments which are facing constraints like resource crunch and lack of infrastructure.”However, the states where the food industry had a bigger presence had moved ahead steadily.He further informed that three drafts - functional food, labelling and claims, and list of additives – would be going for approval to the scientific committee soon. They are currently reviewed by the scientific panel.
Interestingly, Gaur again emphasised on the issue of labs strengthening and said that even an NABL Accreditation needed to be revised as different NABL-accredited labs were coming up with different results for the same tests on one food particle.He further said that FSSAI was planning to set up 125 more labs in rural areas of the country. Gaur said that after the law was enacted in 2006, the actual work of the authority towards the implementation of the Act only began after 2008, when the Act was formulated. In the initial years after the formulation of the FSSAI, the meetings of the scientific panel and the committee were not held regularly but now the formal panel members met regularly once in two months to address the concerns of the food industry.

source: fnbnews