India’s food regulator to roll out hygiene ratings for meat shops amid coronavirus outbreak

India’s food regulator will continue its ongoing inspection and auditing of slaughterhouses in the country especially as the global outbreak of the Coronavirus epidemic—that reportedly originated at a wet market in China’s Wuhan City—has highlighted the need for ensuring the hygiene and safety standards of meat shops and slaughterhouses in the country.

The FSSAI that has already been auditing meat and fish shops, and slaughterhouses for some time now has stepped up efforts in the past six to eight months to ensure better safety and standards at such shops, the food regulator’s CEO, Pawan Agarwal told reporters on Monday.

The regulator is also in the process of introducing hygiene ratings for meat shops.

“The hygiene of our meat and fish shops and slaughterhouses is very critical. Slaughtering meat products in India requires a lot of hygiene upgradation. About six to eight months FSSAI took some steps to improve the hygiene of such shops,”Agarwal told reporters at the sideline of the food regulator’s regional office in Ghaziabad on Monday.

“In the first phase, we had done a third party audit of all the municipal slaughterhouses , and in the second phase we had taken up third-party audit of all slaughterhouses in the country at the cost of the FSSAI. We are introducing, hygiene rating schemes for meat shops,” he said.

The FSSAI has also created a standard operating procedure for certifying meat shops through hygiene ratings. For this, it has already roped in state governments.

It has initially offered to fund hygiene ratings for 50 slaughterhouses in a bid to kick start the process.

Agarwal hopes that over a period of time, hygiene ratings of meat and fish shops will become commonplace and consumer acceptance for such shops will encourage more such shops to adopt these measures.

He added that while, the coronavirus has no impact on meat products being sold in the country “but because there awareness in the country surrounding coronavirus, we want to leverage that to improve the hygiene conditions of our meat and fish markets.”

FSSAI that monitors the quality, and hygiene of packaged and loose food being sold, manufactured, and imported in India drew up firm plans to ensure better quality and hygiene standards of India’s slaughterhouses over the last few years.

As of Monday, the novel Coronavirus—first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December last year—had caused over 1,700 deaths and impacted over 71,000 .

The spread of the deadly novel coronavirus has halted global supply chains, and restricted movement in China’s mainland as the country grapples to contain the spread of the virus.

On Monday, the FSSAI also announced plans to expand the reach of its regional offices, and food testing labs in the country.

In all, the food regulator will set up six new branch offices, four new import offices and two new food laboratories in the country. With this, FSSAI will have four regional offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, twelve branch offices and six import offices. FSSAI has recently upgraded its food laboratory at Ghaziabad.

New locations will help the FSSAI bolster its presence across India.

“This would help FSSAI to strengthen its inspection and enforcement activities and have better control of imported food. Location of new offices has been decided after taking into account the workload of food imports and central licensing at various places,” Rita Teaotia , chairperson, FSSAI, said on Monday.

Teaotia also said that the food regulator is stepping up efforts to monitor imported food items in India and ensure they are tested adequately.

New labs and offices will also help the regulator monitor food imports.

“This (imports) is an extremely important area where we need to screen the products being imported in to the country, to see they are compliant with our standards and that none of them is a source of anything that could lead to an infection or an outbreak or does not meet the regulatory standard of the country,” she said.

Agarwal added that the regulator will now start market surveillance of imported products. “

We may begin doing that for a few commodities which are high risk and then extend market surveillance throughout the country to ensure that food items that are not allowed in the market by the regulator do not find ways to enter the country,” he said.