November 16, 2006

More often than not, products have exceeded their shelf life while others are way past their expiration date. In either case, these goods are no longer fit for human consumption –– goods that most retail stores and some supermarkets are all-too-eager to sell to unsuspecting buyers. Their weapon of choice? Huge discounts on things that would normally cost an arm and a leg coupled with the “two for the price of one” offers that make the rounds every now and then

Flavoured popcorn and cheese pellets, pop tarts and nachos, hard candy and butter cookies, marshmallows and breath mints... never before has grocery shopping in Karachi been more fun. The choices available on retail stores are endless as buyers spend hours trying to decide whether to buy the oh-so-reasonably priced orange juice from Malaysia or its UAE-produced counterpart.

Visit any supermarket or retail store and you will know what I am talking about –– the shelves are lined with both imported and locally-produced drool-worthy and relatively cheap eatables which promise to leave you craving for more. With energy drinks and chocolate turning into a second nature of sorts for most middle and upper-middle class consumers in the city, grocery shopping, or just shopping in general for that matter, is an activity that many people look forward to in more ways than one.

However, as with most things, one does have to pay a steep price for this seemingly affordable array of goods found in stores. It is the inability to read the fine print –– the barely visible, almost illegible manufacturing and expiry dates featured on the packaging of these items. More often than not, these great buys that consumers are intent on serving at kitty parties and brunches have exceeded their shelf life while others are way past their expiration date. In either case, these goods are no longer fit for human consumption –– goods that most retail stores and some supermarkets are all-too-eager to sell to unsuspecting buyers. Their weapon of choice? Huge discounts on things that would normally cost an arm and a leg coupled with the “two for the price of one” offers that make the rounds every now and then.

Consider, for example, a popular super store that sells almost every local and imported edible item under the sun. Amid the dusty confines of this store’s shelves stand fruit juices, cereal, jams and jellies, etc., at prices that would put most well-known supermarkets to shame. The state, in which they are found, of course, is another story. “I don’t think anyone bothers to clean the dust that accumulates on the shelves and the products,” complains Aisha, a middle-aged housewife, who buys her groceries from the store.

In fact, on several occasions, Aisha has had to return cartons of milk that she purchased from the store because “the milk had gone bad. It was stinking and the tetra packs had turned mouldy. When I looked closely, I saw that the milk had expired,” she explains, pointing out that instead of admitting that they were selling sub-standard products, the management turned defensive when Aisha complained that there was something fishy about the packaged milk available in the store. Still, Aisha continues to buy her groceries from the same store because she feels that the prices offered are well within her monthly budget so she chooses to look the other way every time she finds that the bread is stale or the tea tastes funny.

What is more disturbing is the fact that even if a particular item isn’t past its expiry date, the printed date will wear off if so much as a finger is gently rubbed over it. It’s almost as if the dates have been tampered with. “Yes, they have,” says Kaukab Iqbal, Chairman of the Consumers’ Association of Pakistan. “You see, most edible items sold in developed countries have a shelf life after which these products are disposed off if no one buys them.”

However, the kind of disposal that takes place isn’t exactly what the manufacturers had in mind. In most cases, these products are repackaged, featuring brand, new expiry dates and are exported to developing countries like Pakistan. Since there is no mechanism in place which can actually verify whether or not these products can be consumed, the customs’ department simply relies on the deceptive expiry dates and, thus, the items are distributed throughout the city to various supermarkets and retail outlets.

Iqbal feels a laboratory testing facility should be provided at the port so that the officials concerned can verify the quality of the product by taking samples and running tests on the spot. “That way, if the goods are sub-standard, then the testing facility will ensure they are not given clearance,” he maintains.

Easier said than done. The Ministry of Science and Technology’s regulatory body, Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA), which in theory should keep a check on both the imports and exports, has its own demon to deal with – lack of resources. “We have a severe shortage of manpower and funds,” points out Rehmatullah Memon, PSQCA’s media advisor. While there are consumer protection laws related to edible products for purposes of health and safety, PSQCA simply does not have enough resources to ensure their implementation.

Currently, there are about 25 PSQCA food and health inspectors to monitor the quality of edible items being sold throughout the country, out of which eight are working in Sindh. “How can you expect eight people to cover the entire province? It is simply not possible and so we do what we can and try to focus on the bare essentials,” he adds.

Absence of enough PSQCA testing facilities is another problem – only two are available in the country at the moment, one in Karachi and the other in Lahore – so food sampling and testing is not only difficult, it is also mostly restricted to urban centres where most of the food and drink factories are located. Thus, often, consumers in rural areas are caught unaware every time they find that the cooking oil they bought smells funny or their soft drink has gone flat.

Even so, the PSQCA cannot be absolved from guilt for the list of compulsory items which they are required to closely monitor – 46 products which include edibles like biscuits, ghee, oil and bottled mineral water – focuses on locally-produced items and not imports. So even if the department had the resources, there would still be no way to determine the kind of food products being imported.

Of course, some believe that the PSQCA is just too indolent to take action when required. A small example of this is the oil being sold at utility stores ––– a government-run outfit ––– throughout the country. The oil, which is packaged by, and marketed at, these stores and is slightly cheaper than other brands available in the market, was recently declared unfit for human consumption by PSQCA, says Hameed Maker of the Helpline Trust, Karachi. To date, however, this oil is still being sold at all utility stores. “The PSQCA did absolutely nothing about it,” explains Maker, even though the Trust wrote to it several times, apart from addressing the other authorities concerned.

Even more appalling is the fact that consumers continue to buy this sub-standard oil from utility stores even though many are aware of its repercussions –– food poisoning being one of them. So the cliché that the consumers don’t know anything is just that: a cliché. If anything the “Pakistani consumer is his/her own worst enemy because they just don’t care,” says Maker.

Indeed, consumers like Aisha only serve to reinforce this perception, as they continue to buy things from the very store that has been selling them sub-standard products. A case in point here is Farrukh, a 20-something father of two girls, who had food poisoning three times after eating pakoras fried in expired ghee bought from an extremely prestigious supermarket. For a few months, he decided to steer clear of the store and did all his grocery shopping from a lesser known retail outlet. However, unhappy with the arrangement, his wife insisted that they go back to shopping from the old store because “it is a place to see and be seen,” he says, quoting his wife.

It is not just the regulatory bodies and consumers who are at fault here ––– the poorly designed legislation must also be held accountable. For one thing, there is no such thing as a “consumer law” per se in the country and the laws that do exist, most of which are found in the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), award nominal punishment in case the consumers’ rights are violated. Section 272, which charges all those who “adulterate any article of food and drink, making it harmful, and intending to sell the same as food and drink” with a criminal offence awards “imprisonment up to six months and/or a fine up to Rs1,000.”

Similarly, Section 273 which says that “whoever knowing any article of food or drink to be harmful, offers the same for sale” has committed a crime, awards the same punishment. This is, clearly, a small price to pay for an act which puts human lives in jeopardy. Even if store owners and retailers are apprehended, they know there is a good chance that nothing of consequence will happen, apart from greasing a few palms here and there and spending a very small amount of time in jail. This is particularly a big problem in Sindh where the Consumers’ Protection Ordinance –– which was introduced some 10 years back in Punjab and later in Balochistan and NWFP –– has lapsed and while the rest of the country “follows” this Ordinance, Sindh has no such supplementary legislation. Thus, in the absence of accountability, anarchy reigns supreme.

Crying “bloody murder” every time one encounters an expired or a sub-standard edible item, however, doesn’t really help because the quality of goods found in the market is merely symptomatic of a deeper, underlying problem, that is, an unpredictable economy. The fact of the matter is that at the moment, Pakistan’s economy does not have the “capacity to allow for the enforcement of standards,” explains Abrar Hafeez, secretary-general of the Consumer Rights Council of Pakistan (CRCP), Islamabad.

Closing down a shop that sells sub-standard products or a factory that produces the same hardly solves anything for the simple reason that it leads to unemployment, says Hafeez. Given the abject poverty, maximum enforcement of quality control standards means expensive products which, in all honesty, would be out of reach for most consumers.

Also worth mentioning here is the fact that Pakistan is not really a target market for imports from developed countries because it is convenient for the latter to make a profit on things they don’t need. Thus, Pakistan is a veritable “dumping ground for most developed countries like Australia and UAE where one can sell just about anything regardless of its quality,” points out Hafeez. This is obvious from the packaging of the products on which the ingredients and other details are never written in Urdu or (not very often) in English. “If Pakistan were a target market, the text on the packaging would have been in Urdu or at least in English to suit the needs of the people here,” maintains Hafeez.

An easier and practical way to deal with the problem would be to ensure minimum standard enforcement – which it appears is also not happening though Pakistan is said to have adopted 16,000 International Standards Organisation (ISO) designed standards – with a gradual increase leading to maximum implementation to meet the requirements of the ever-changing economic conditions in the country. This way, at least, there would be some semblance of quality control rather than a complete absence of any standards whatsoever.

Store owners, on the other hand, are quick to write off the presence of any standards, minimum or otherwise. “We barely have enough left for ourselves after paying off all the taxes and duties and the government wants us to follow standards? First, they should provide subsidies and then talk about standards,” seethes the manager of a supermarket. One is disinclined to believe his claims, of course, going by the amount of customers present in the store.

It is interesting to note that while many stores sell edible items like cheese, milk, biscuits and chocolates which have a tendency to go bad rather quickly, they do not bother to refrigerate them or keep them in a shady place. In fact, they maintain that edible items usually do not need optimum temperature conditions for storage because their packaging prevents them from going bad: “It’s just a lot of talk, nothing of the sort happens. Things don’t go bad because they are not kept in a cool place,” is the incredulously naïve response of salesperson at a retail store. Clearly, both the store owners and their salespeople are either blissfully unaware of the virtues of quality control and food standards or they simply choose to ignore them in a bid to make handsome profits, but it is more likely that the latter is the main reason.

Quality, some say, is a relative term which is subject to change depending on the circumstances. Be as that may, the definition of the quality of human life is just not open to interpretation. The trick is to maintain it and this is what consumers in Pakistan need to do – maintain the quality of their lives by discouraging the sale and proliferation of sub-standard edible items.

 

Aping is not the answer

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions and perhaps no one knows this better than the Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA). Granted that the Authority’s intentions are noble, unfortunately, they are also misplaced. “The problem is that what the PSQCA is doing does not necessarily work for Pakistan,” says Abrar Hafeez of the Consumer Rights’ Council Pakistan. “There are a lot of things being produced in Pakistan that are only specific to our country, such as, achaar (pickled vegetables) and chutney and so the kind of storage conditions required for such items is quite different from those practiced in foreign countries.” So what works in Malaysia – where food and drug standards are strictly implemented and the inability to do so results in severe punishment by the law-enforcing agencies – may or may not work for Pakistan. “The fact of the matter is that most of the quality control models which have been “implemented” in Pakistan have been borrowed from other, developed countries where the economic and weather conditions are quite different. Also, some of the food items being prepared in such countries are extremely dissimilar to those being produced in Pakistan where food is rich in oil and spices. Thus, edible items like achaar, chutney, frozen aloo parathas, canned haleem and popadums are likely to go bad easily, given the ingredients used in them, and require different production and storage conditions. So “instead of adopting models which have been successful in developed countries, we should try to establish new models which will actually be useful,” points out Hafeez. A new agenda, it seems, is in order.  — S.W.P

 

‘Everything’s different’

“It’s not just the food, it’s everything,” says Shaheen, a regular customer of a grocery store. Newly married, Shaheen is just learning the ropes, particularly when it comes to doing the monthly grocery shopping. One day, while washing the lentils she bought from the store in question, she realised, much to her horror, that it was losing colour. Enraged, she went back to the store to return them because she suspected they had been “dyed”. The salesperson complied sheepishly when she threatened to raise hell while other customers were present in the store. Shaheen then bought the lentils from another store but once again, the colour faded upon washing them. This is when her mother intervened and told her dyed lentils was a norm in Karachi and told her to take it in her stride. It was then that she began noticing the “changes” in other items that she purchased. “I have been using the same shampoo for about six years now,” she explains. “After the lentil incident, I noticed that it just didn’t smell the way it used to before. It’s the same thing with everything: detergent, lotions, soap, you name it. There is something different about everything now.” Shaheen is right – everything is different. Empty shampoo, lotion, hand wash and body wash bottles are sold by the bulk to store owners who “then fill these bottles with original products which have been mixed in water or oil,” says a salesperson at the same store, who did not wish to be named. The result: tampered products which do not always work and huge profits for store owners. “I am telling you, everything is different,” insists Shaheen. Indeed, it is.  — S.W.P

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)