Rampant food adulteration

The National Assembly's Standing Committee on Human Rights recently took up for discussion the report of its sub-committee on food adulteration, which made the disturbing disclosure that over 70 percent of food stuffs in the market are adulterated.
The report says 52 percent of the bottled water contains bacteriological, arsenic, nitrate and fluoride contamination. The Pakistan Council of Research on Water Resources, based on its three-month long (January-March 2010) water quality monitoring of 63 commercial brands in nine major cities - Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Bahawalpur, Multan, Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi and Hyderabad - discovered that 33 of them were unfit for consumption.
Out of these, 14 contained high concentrations of arsenic, sodium, potassium and fluoride while 22 brands had microbiological contamination. The committee also noted with concern that packed milk and meat are tainted with dangerous chemicals. Packed milk, for instance, is laced with caustic soda, urea fertiliser, liquid hydrogen, detergent, etc. It is not difficult to imagine the harm such things cause to human health.
The NA Standing Committee deserves praise for paying attention to this serious public health hazard. However, the press reports detailing the proceedings of its meeting mention no follow-up plan to put a stringent check on food adulteration.
Instead it passed on the responsibility to Pemra, urging it to direct television channels to create awareness about adulteration issues. Indeed, awareness is an important way of dealing with the issue. But the NA committee could have done better by also recommending ways and means to improve the efficacy of the governmental quality control mechanism and laws.
Pakistan is a signatory to UN guidelines for consumer protection, 1985. There is a Consumer Rights Commission of Pakistan, and also consumer rights councils and consumer courts to protect citizens against harmful food products and their production process. But not many people know about them. The commission needs to take on a more proactive role to inform the public about the availability of opportunity for redress. This though would not be enough.
Notably there are different laws to deal with the issue, but they provide for too lenient penalties for the offenders. Violation of Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Act, 1996, for instance, is punishable with imprisonment of up to one year and a fine of not less than Rs 30,000. Even if someone wins a case in a consumer court, the punishment is unlikely to hurt the offender much. The legislators, who took the trouble to investigate the prevalence of food adulteration, must also think about strengthening the relevant laws, so they act as effective deterrence.