The South Sudan National Bureau of Standards (NBS) on Friday concluded a workshop on food safety standards in the East Africa region attended by representatives from the Bureau of Standards of Kenya, Tanzania, and Burundi.
Speaking at the closing of the workshop in Juba, Mary Gordon Muortat, the Chief Executive Officer of the NBS, stressed the importance of ensuring that food items imported to the region meet standards.
“We must ensure that East Africa as a region has food safety standards that are available, that are used, that are agreed and that are suitable for us in the East African region,” she said.
For his part, Beny Gideon, the undersecretary at the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and East Africa Community (EAC) Affairs, appealed to the participants to protect consumer interests by ensuring all food products entering the region meet the safety standards.
“The testing and certification of the products before they go to the market is your collective primary responsibility so that you ensure that the goods and services meet the standards of consumption, purity, and proper labeling that will guarantee and protect the consumer interests because every consumer would want to have access to products that are free of any threats and free of any wrong calculation,” he said. “In our labor market, we sometimes allow for the consumption of products that are not properly assessed and therefore your role of market surveillance is key because it is the only way to detect what has been brought to the market is safe for the consumer”.