THE recent Australian sheep off-loading at Karachi port, their shifting from the yards where they were supposedly quarantined and their secret travel to far deeper in-land farms of Sindh is a matter of concern for everyone.

This is regardless of the fact whether these animals had any health issues or not.

The global meat traders would inevitably read it as an institutional failure to ensure international compliance, something which would badly hit the country’s efforts to promote itself as “Hilal hub”. If it cannot ensure basic health pre-requisites of livestock trade, can it be trusted by foreign buyers for meat imports.

The manner in which the sheep landed at Karachi port raises some very basic questions about the trade ethics and legal system. To begin with, these animals were not meant for Pakistan but for Gulf states. The importing country wanted the animals to go through some basic health testing before allowing the off-loading. Instead, the sheep were hurriedly shipped back to Pakistan and off-loaded without any precautions.

To make the matter even worse, the way they were dumped hardly made quarantine sense. They were put in yards next to other animals meant for export, if different television footages are to be believed. If the sheep were infested, as reported first, the diseases could have easily spread to all others in the vicinity — making all of them suspect, putting question mark on their health and meat exports.

This is a serious matter, and should be taken as such. The sensitive international consumers hardly take such issues lightly.

At present, quarantine checks, which are at the heart of the entire issue, have become an administrative football between the provincial and federal governments after the 18th Amendment. The federal government still appoints all these quarantines officials through the Ministry of Food Security and Research. It is still running some diary development projects because it had to accommodate some politicians and their sons-in-law. However, when such a breakdown occurs, it deflects the blame to the provinces saying that they deal with them as a part of overall agriculture sector. It is thus institutional confusion at the policy level, though the federation still administratively holds the quarantine machinery.

This confusion stems from the fact that during the consensus-building process in the run-up to the 18th amendment, the fate of the agriculture sector was negotiated as an extension of the provincial autonomy. Neither the provinces nor the centrefully aware of how to deal with the consequences of the amendment.

Of late, the federal ministry had proposed National Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health Regulatory Authority bill. It is still trying to get opinion from the provinces and different stakeholders. When would it get that kind of response, build consensus, convert it into a national law, ask the provinces to enact their own laws, reflecting national consensus and then create implementation infrastructure, is not yet clear. .

That is precisely why the provinces, especially Punjab being the biggest stakeholder, need to move quickly to enact their own laws.

For the last few years, Punjab has moved in the direction of promoting itself, along with Pakistan, as Hilal hub.

In the same effort, it built one of the biggest and latest “hilal slaughter house” near Lahore, and also got it approved by a number of countries for export. With such kind of failures, the entire effort would receive a setback..

If the federal government still does not know, how to “implement inspection and quarantine controls at ports of entry and exit with regard to import and export of animals, plants and agricultural products, food and feed, including certification of consignments in relation to compliance with food safety and sanitary and phyto-sanitary conditions,” as required by the National Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health Regulatory Authority Act, one can only wonder what it had been doing for the last six decades.

The world has made quality assurance easy with structured systems that sum up consumers’ concerns for feed and food trade.

They include Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) measures, traceability, residual agrochemicals, Good Agricultural Practices, quarantine treatments and safety of food packaging materials. In order to remove these concerns, the international community has also created a system of certifications: Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), GlobalGAP, the British Retailer’s Consortium (BRC) and the Monitoring of Maximum Residues Limits (MRLs). These systems are considered key to international trade.

The basic premise, which concerns the world, still holds: how safe Pakistani exports can be with such a loose, open to corruption administrative set-up, non-existent legal regime, and confusing overlapping functions  among different institutions.