December 4, 2002	Wednesday	Ramazan 28,1423

LAHORE, Dec 3: The Pakistan Vanaspati Manufacturers Association (PVMA) has urged the government to take strong action for curbing poor and bad manufacturing practices by unregistered ghee producers playing with people’s health.

“The government (regulatory) bodies as well as the Pakistan Standard Quality Institute (PSQI) must play its role to check malpractices by those who have not been given PVMA membership due to their failure to comply with government’s quality standards,” said PVMA chairman Sheikh Abdul Razzak in a statement issued here on Monday.

He said the PVMA was doing its best to protect the consumer interests and maintain quality as required under the government regulations. He said most vanaspati producers had state-of-the-art processing technology and were taking care in processing raw material. He claimed that only a few unregistered producers were responsible for marketing poor quality ghee and they should be taken to task.

According to the PVMA, the people in Pakistan consumes about two million tons of cooking fats, including 1.2-1.3 million tons of vanaspati, every year.

It says only 300,000 tons of cooking oil and as much of crude oil — unprocessed soyabean, sunflower and cottonseed oil — is used. Some 30 per cent raw material requirement is met by the locally produced oilseeds while 50 per cent edible oil in the form of palm oil is imported from Indonesia and Malaysia for making vanaspati. Rest of the 20 per cent is imported in the shape of canola and soyabean from various countries.

To ensure quality standards, Razzak said, the PVMA had set up its own monitoring system and gave membership only to those producers who had proper infrastructure to meet the quality standards. “We also conduct quality checks and impose fines on those who fail to meet the quality,” he said. He claimed that the PVMA efforts had borne fruit and only five per cent producers were now using old tin plates — harmful to human health — for packaging their product. He also called for reducing import taxes on new tin to lower the vanaspati prices.