Rural Food Safety Awareness
and (1999) have asserted that, “food is critical contributor to physical well-being and major source of pleasure, worry and stress” as the consumers are faced with range of competitively priced food products of consistently high quality. Thus, every food item must be safe, pleasing, good tasting, and consistent with the product image. Variations within the same batch or between batches of product must be kept to a minimum since consumers interpret them as an indication of production faults. The instrumentation and food safety practices are of central importance, with particular emphasis on high sanitary and hygienic operating standards. and (1993) have noted “food safety as the inverse of food risk, probability of not suffering some hazard from consuming specific food. Potential undesirable residues in foods span a broad range, from natural and environmental contaminants, veterinary drugs, growth promoters, packaging components, and many more.
According to (1999), “microbiological considerations are an even greater challenge to safety of food because potentially harmful micro organisms have the ability either to grow rapidly from very low numbers in food or to proliferate in the human body once ingested”. Food safety is high profile issue facing consumers, agricultural marketers, farmers and governments, lost productivity from food borne illnesses per year. There incidents involving range of products create adverse publicity and result in negative images of the food sector Rwanda consumers are exposed to stories in the media cataloguing food safety incidents from around the world. Food safety is one of the most important issues facing primary producers, marketers and government during 1990s and consumer concerns with regards to food safety of the food they eat has been increasing over the years.
Food safety issues have become an increasingly important non-tariff barrier in international trade. and (1991) argue that invisible hazards and imperfect information cause substantial losses to all participants in the food chain. The latter believe that there is a need for improved physical, biological and economic data on food safety risks to be available to consumers, producers, processors and regulators. and (1995) have advocated food industry policy of educating consumers as remedy for flawed perceptions about food safety. Thus, harmonization of international food safety standards is an important issue that is not likely to be completely resolved in future as there could add development of new technologies that make the measurement of chemical residue levels easier.
(2003), indicated that, “issue of food safety in Africa is one which interacts with and is frequently subjugate to issues of food security, especially in geographic areas where food shortages are caused by recurrent natural weather phenomena such as drought. In addition, many subsistence farming communities in Africa are reliant on the consumption of home grown crops, irrespective of the quality considerations normally applied in the developed world”. He further noted that, “some African governments have instituted food safety regulations to control mycotoxin, especially aflatoxin, contamination of the national food supply and research into natural occurrence of aflatoxins in a range of local foods is widely conducted” ( 2003).
Ideally, food quality is of increasing importance in contemporary Rwanda as some of their food producers, retailers and government institutions are engaged in an attempt to reassure consumers that their food is of high quality and safe to consume. Yet, the concept of ‘quality’ is one which is contested, constructed and represented differently by diverse actors operating within a variety of regulatory and market arenas. There emerges that, despite new regulatory frameworks and consumer concerns, producers usually define quality in terms of product specification and attraction rather than through official certification schemes or association with region of origin.
Rural food safety awareness as well as food quality works well as there are regulations known as well as constructed within the context of maintaining stable relationships between producers and buyers. Furthermore, marketing is based on low cost methods which demand high personal input of time and energy from the entrepreneur. Food safety awareness and quality should be understood as contested notion which is constructed by actors attempting to build stable and lasting networks between themselves and others within the market arena. Fresh food products have a high income elasticity of demand and few traditional trade barriers in high income markets. There can be challenges and issues in meeting food safety standards and kinds of issues that arise from those products, role of farm to table approaches and hazard analysis critical control points in ensuring safety as well as the role of Rwanda’s public sector upon facilitating food business trade as well as the potential role of food safety agreement in resolving disputes and determining equivalency of rural food standards between high and low income Rwanda residents.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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