Indisputably, the people's right to safe food is trampled under the foot of a section of profit-hungry and neglectful producers and sellers of food items in this part of the world. Purity and safety of any food item, be it grown in the farmers' field or produced in factories or cooked in eateries, cannot be guaranteed here. In such a situation, the reported move on the part of the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority (BFSA) to declare some selected areas of Dhaka city as 'safe food zone' on an experimental basis would surely evoke people's interest. The BFSA will be keeping its efforts confined to ensuring proper hygienic conditions in restaurants located in busy Motijheel, Dilkusha and Paltan areas of Dhaka city where thousands of people take foods daily.
The Dhaka City South segment of the Bangladesh Restaurant Owners Association has welcomed the initiative and, reportedly, assured the BFSA of complying with the latter's guidelines on food safety and hygienic conditions. Under the proposed move, customers of the restaurants of the selected areas will have access to kitchens to see for themselves the environment and hygienic conditions there and quality of foods served. This will be in addition to regular inspection and monitoring by the BFSA personnel. On the basis of customers' observations and BFSA inspection, red, yellow and green stickers would be given to the restaurants located in the designated areas under the pilot scheme. The green stickers will not be made available to any eatery until and unless it complies with the guidelines fully. The BFSA expects to declare the pilot scheme area safe food zone by February next.
The BFSA initiative, as one of its members explained to the Financial Express recently, has been taken following the failure of the mobile-court drives to effect any tangible change in hygienic conditions even in upscale hotels and restaurants in Dhaka and other major cities and towns of the country. Mobile court drives against producers of sellers of adulterated foods and also against errant restaurants are initiated occasionally by a number of government agencies. But except for realising fines from offenders, the main objective of ensuring the availability of safe foods in eateries, big and small, remains unmet.
The BFSA, instead of using harsh measures right at the beginning, is now banking on a strategy that would inspire restaurant owners through motivation. Harsh measures, including pecuniary ones, would be used only in the case of defiant restaurant owners. However, the BFSA pilot scheme would cover only a limited number of restaurants, keeping a large number of eateries beyond its coverage. So, if success is achieved, it would be a limited one. Yet the pilot safe food zone scheme is a laudable initiative on the part of the BFSA. If proved successful, it could be replicated in other parts of Dhaka and in other places of the country in phases. But, success of the scheme would largely depend on serious and sincere efforts of both BFSA and the restaurant owners. The BFSA is yet to prove its worth as far as ensuring the availability of safe food at the level of general consumers is concerned. Its own pilot scheme has come as an opportunity to do that, it seems.
