Government urged to teach SMEs about healthy food

Eva C. Komandjaja, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Indonesian Food and Beverages Producers Association (Gapmmi) admitted that most unhealthy snack foods sold in schools across the country were produced by small or home industries.

Gapmmi chairman Thomas Darmawan said over the weekend that out of 916,000 food and beverage producers in Indonesia, there were only 5,000 big producers, with the rest being either small or medium enterprises (SMEs).

He said that most of the SMEs did not know how to produce food hygienically, let alone in accordance with the international standards set by the World Health Organization (WHO) or the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Therefore, he urged the government to provide training for the owners of SMEs and educate them on the hazards of using harmful ingredients in their products, instead of blaming them for their unhealthy products and fining them afterwards.

"Currently, the government mostly provides training for government officials. But after they have been trained, they are transferred to another department. They don't get the chance of sharing what the have learned with the SMEs," said Thomas.

He said consumer protection foundations should not always blame the food producers, and yet at the same time do nothing to improve the situation.

"The government, the association and the consumers, and also the SMEs, must be able to work together to solve this problem," said Thomas.

He doubted that law enforcement would be an effective way of stopping the production of unhealthy foodstuffs unless the government educated and trained the SMEs first.

Thomas also said he had been waiting for the issuance of a new government regulation on consumer protection, and food safety and quality.

He said the new regulation, which was necessary in order to facilitate the implementation of Law No. 8/1999 on consumer protection, would help curb the production of unhealthy food and its sale to children.

The Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM) announced last week that after taking 193 samples of snack foods sold in schools in 10 provinces throughout 2003, it found that half of the samples contained substances harmful to children.