Government urged to teach SMEs about healthy food

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.