GEISHA ALON­ZO

Moringa will not get rid of bel­ly fat. Nor will it work to elim­i­nate can­cer.

If it did then there would be no such leaves in the world, Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harat said yes­ter­day.

Ramb­harat made the com­ment at the Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute’s Food Fraud Con­fer­ence at Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain.

He said when dis­cus­sions arise re­gard­ing food fraud it is was ac­cept­able to talk about con­cerns over di­etary and health sup­ple­ments, as he warned there were risks as­so­ci­at­ed with them. The min­is­ter al­so urged cit­i­zens to be vig­i­lant and guard them­selves against false claims made in ad­ver­tis­ing sur­round­ing pop­u­lar foods and sup­ple­ments.

“Our his­to­ry has been tra­di­tion­al reme­dies. When you turn on the TV you won­der what is go­ing on in this coun­try,” Ramb­harat said.

“We have clear­ly lost our way. We have al­lowed a lot of char­la­tans, snake oil sales­men, to fill the tele­vi­sion of­fer­ing all these mir­a­cles cures and in some cas­es hand­ed to them by the Lord Him­self,” the min­is­ter added, say­ing that the life and health of cit­i­zens are too im­por­tant to “be play­ing the fool.”

He said food fraud is mul­ti-di­men­sion­al and rais­es sev­er­al ar­eas of con­cerns, es­pe­cial­ly re­gard­ing the mis­in­for­ma­tion which is spread. These risks can range from min­i­mal, hav­ing no se­ri­ous health con­se­quences to se­ri­ous fi­nan­cial loss­es for com­pa­nies.

He not­ed that his pet peeve was fine print la­belling, as of­ten times the writ­ing is too small, a mat­ter Ramb­harat added has been tabled for the Bu­reau of Stan­dards to tack­le.

Ramb­harat added that greater ef­forts are be­ing made to en­sure lo­cal poul­try de­pots meet nec­es­sary san­i­tary re­quire­ments.

Sheep and Goat Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion Shi­raz Khan called for bet­ter stan­dards to be im­ple­ment­ed re­gard­ing poul­try and oth­er meats.

“We ought to be im­port­ing on­ly what we need. For ex­am­ple, if Trinidad con­sumes 100 met­ric tonnes of chick­en and we are pro­duc­ing 60 tonnes, shouldn’t we be im­port­ing on­ly 40 tonnes?

“Where are the reg­u­la­tions re­gard­ing the quan­ti­ties of im­por­ta­tion? Those things have not been ad­dressed.” Khan said.

The con­fer­ence aims to strength­en the abil­i­ty of the lo­cal food in­dus­try to de­tect and com­bat food fraud across the sup­ply chains and thus pro­tect cus­tomers by en­abling com­pa­nies to iden­ti­fy their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and plan mit­i­ga­tion ef­forts.