Creating hope for food processors

For all the time he has been in food processing, ensuring that their product attracts the consumer is what has bothered the mind of Prince Mang’ombe and all those with whom he runs the Wovwe Rice Producers and Processors Association.

Their product, Kilombero, is a rice brand so popular and tried and tested for one to ignore. But Mang’ombe and his friends have remained worried.

“Enhancing hygiene during food processing is of paramount importance. Any food discovered to be contaminated will be shunned regardless of how good it looks,” says Mang’ombe.

“Packaging and its design is another challenge that we need to overcome if our product is to continue attracting customers on the market.”

These challenges are not only for the Karonga-based group which is registered under the One Village One Product (Ovop). Many other organisations established to respond to the call of enhancing production and ensuring good representation of Malawian products on the global market face similar challenges.

The Malawi Bureau of Standards (MBS), an institution established to standardize and accredit manufactured products with the view of removing safety doubts from those wanting to buy it, agrees that most of these organisations are below the desired standards on sanitation and quality control.

“The greatest shortfalls in goods by these organisations have been registered in sanitation and quality control particularly in volume and performance of the products,” says Davlin Chokazinga, MBS Acting Director General.

“But quality management is the most important tool for any business growth. Customers should be assured of safety before they buy the product. There is no entertainment for less quality products on the market.”

With such revelations, the likes of Mang’ombe and company should really be thrown into action, action to improve their situation. There is a lot of potential for Malawian products to penetrate the global market.

But all products targeting global markets have to pass the test of safety or risk rejection. Precedents set elsewhere by food goods lacking safety and quality have given consumers another sense – attention to detail when buying food items.

Less than a month ago, up to 84 children died in Nigeria after being fed on a product aimed at enhancing the growth of milk teeth in the children. The product, My Pikin, Pidgin English for My Child, was found to be containing a thickening agent normally used in brake fluid as an anti-freeze. It was discovered by the National Agency for Food, Drugs Administration and Control (Nafdac).

Again, in 2008, another incident bordering on food safety caused jitters across the world. The incident dubbed “2008 Chinese milk scandal” and registered in the People’s Republic of China involved milk and infant formula, and other food materials and components.

The products were reported to have been contaminated with melamine, a white crystalline solid used in the manufacturing of resins and in leather tanning. With China’s wide range of export food products, the incident affected countries on all continents. China reported an estimated 300,000 victims and up to 860 babies hospitalized.

“The developed world stresses a lot on safety and quality,” added Chokazinga.

Unfortunately, the challenge to ensure safety and quality in goods produced under the Ovop concept is overwhelming the organisations concerned at a time when stakeholders are converging efforts to enhance production initiatives.

With funding from the European Union (EU), The Story Workshop, an organisation promoting grassroot development, is running a Mwana alirenji programme aimed at promoting food processing at household level.

The programme seeks to avert a situation where Malawi keeps harvesting plentiful food, yet failure in storing such food due to lack of expertise in food processing leads the country’s populace to feeling the pinch instituted by hunger.

Recently, the Malawi Government also signed a partnership creating a highway for a lot of locally produced goods to Chinese markets. The agreement is an addition to other initiatives aimed at sending Malawian products to regional and overseas markets including EU countries.

The development means that a lot of items would be processed. Unfortunately, they would not take advantage of the several agreements and offer competition on the global market unless safety and quality controls are swiftly adopted.

“There is no room for substandard products,” says Director of Industry in the Ministry of Industry and Trade Chris Kachiza. “There could be opportunities, but without quality products risk rejection.

“Customers will shun them and prefer foreign products. That has been proven even on the domestic market. Customers go for quality products and those that are well packaged. You can rest assured that a customer will go for a bottle of honey that does not leak even when a bottle that leaks contains the same quality of honey.”

Fortunately, hope is being created to see products like those of the Wovwe Rice Producers and Processors Association and other Ovop-registered manufacturers adopt safety thereby trade competitively on the global market. The MBS has targeted such groups, teaching them how to add quality to and enhance safety of their products.

The MBS, blamed for not standardizing most of these products leading to their tough life on the market, is coordinating workshops on how these groups could add quality to their products.

Chokazinga said on the sidelines of an opening ceremony for a two-day Food Safety and Quality Assurance workshop in Blantyre Tuesday that equipping a participant with such skills would cost K20,000 a day. But what is at stake convinced the organisation to facilitate the workshop for free.

“Liberalisation has opened up opportunities for products to trade freely and without barriers. As we send our products on the global markets customers should be assured of safety,” said Chokazinga. The Blantyre workshop attracted 25 representatives from across the country. They included Mang’ombe.

The organisation is also visiting individual groups to ensure that they adhere to proper sanitary measures.

Such workshops collectively and generally target those organisations operating under the Ovop concept. However, with the impact of My Pikin and the Chinese Milk scandal fresh in people’s minds, organisations in food processing would be the ones seeing greatest hope and benefiting the most from such initiatives.

With The Story Workshop promoting food processing under the Mwana alirenji programme and the global market steadily opening up for products processed under initiatives like one by Ovop, Malawian food products could soon find themselves on such markets. But who will risk their lives and go for them when they lack quality and hardly exhibit safety?