Government issues list of banned Euro foods

JAKARTA (JP): The Ministry of Health issued on Thursday a list of European farm and dairy products which have been banned or temporarily withdrawn from the market.

The banned products include Elle & Vire's UHT skim milk in vanilla, strawberry, chocolate and natural flavors and Magnum ice cream. These products were imported from Belgium and France.

The ministry said all local food products using Belgian farm or dairy materials produced after Jan. 19 were also banned from sales and distribution in the local market until the dioxin case was internationally cleared.

Twenty-four products, including butter, cheese, corned beef and chicken hot dogs made in the Netherlands, France or Germany after Jan. 19 this year, are listed as products to be recalled from the Indonesian market.

The products may be sold after they pass tests conducted by the ministry's Directorate General of Food and Medicine Supervision.

Dutch products to be temporarily banned from sales include Campina Dutch Breda Butter, De Hollandsche Boerin cheese, Pregestimil milk powder and Breda butter.

French products include processed chicken from Pere de Du Tomato, Pere de Du Fillet Corden, Pere de Du Nuggets and Pere de Du Drum Sticks, Maya Brand corned beef, ABC corned beef, President salted and unsalted butter, Elle & Vire's skimmed milk, butter, cheese and cheese spread, and Suny Boy's full cream milk powder and UHT milk.

While the only German product affected is Plumrose's chicken hot dogs.

Meanwhile, the commercial attache of the French Embassy in Jakarta, Francois Sporrer, maintained that all French dairy and farm products sold in Indonesia had been thoroughly examined by related institutions in France before being exported.

"We are very confident about our products. All French products, both imported before and after the emergence of the food scare in Belgium, are dioxin-free," he told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

France has since 1994 applied tight examination procedures, including testing dioxin levels, on its dairy products to be sold locally or overseas and has so far not found a dioxide-related problem, he said.

Norman Chen, the director of the company which imported the banned Elle & Vire milk, cheese and butter products, told the Post that the company, PT Dayacipta Sempurna, gave the products' dioxin-free certificates issued recently in Belgium and France to the Ministry of Health on Thursday.

"(The naming of Elle & Vire in the banned products list is) quite a loss for us. But maybe we were late in presenting the certificates so the ministry included our products in the list of banned products," he said.

The Belgian food scare emerged in late May when Belgium announced that high levels of cancer-causing dioxin in chicken and eggs had spread to the country's pork, beef and dairy products.

The scare has led many countries, including the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia, to impose blanket trade bans on European farm and dairy products.

The European Union's executive body, the European Commission, has ordered its 15 member states to ensure that all food and feed that has the potential to be contaminated by dioxin be traced, removed from the market and destroyed.

The ministry has assured that all locally made milk products, including milk powder, skim milk, infant formula, condensed, sterilized and evaporated, has been tested and certified as dioxin-free since they do not contain ingredients from Europe, but are made with ingredients from America, Australia and New Zealand.(cst)