Press Release
April 7, 2009

Loren bill gives BFAD more teeth against fake goods

WARNING that the threat of tainted and counterfeit food has become a global concern, Senator Loren Legarda, chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Demography, batted yesterday for stricter testing of all food and health products sold to the public in the Philippines.

"Trade in counterfeit food has become a $50-billion a year industry according to a study of the Michigan State University," said Loren, who moved for the strengthening of the regulatory powers of the Bureau of Food and Drugs (BFAD).

"This concerns us as much as other nations as counterfeit food items, medicines and supplements are said to be flooding global markets, thereby endangering the health and wellbeing of people," she stressed.

Loren has authored Senate Bill No. 2645 which, if passed into law, would create the Food, Drugs, Cosmetics and Devices Administration (FDCDA).

The bill calls for the strengthening of the BFAD's regulatory capacity, seeks to establish field testing laboratories, and assigns to the FDCDA the role of ordering a ban or recall on products for which it had received complaints from the public.

To ensure due process for traders, the FDCDA is mandated to conduct investigations on the merits of the complaints, she explained.

"But the health and safety of our people is the paramount concern, thus a suspension on the trade of suspicious products may be ordered pending a full-blown probe on the basis of the complaints," Loren said.

"Unlike other counterfeit items like bags and clothing, counterfeit food and health products are of graver concern for us because they can kill, injure or result to illnesses."

She cited as example the health crisis spawned by the sale to the public of milk contaminated with melamine, which killed and made sick a number of children in China. In the Philippines, the melamine scare caused the pullout from store shelves of milk and other dairy products sourced from China.

Loren's proposed legislation also aims to strengthen the post-market surveillance system, which means that the FDCDA will continue to monitor and regulate food and health products even after its production or even when the end products are already in market and store shelves.

She said that the Philippines must link up with global rapid alert systems to protect Filipinos from goods that had been found to be counterfeit or tainted.

Likewise, Loren said the Philippines may consider moves parallel to what the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are doing, including developing a system to better diagnose which shipments pose the most risk and to people.

While she said the Philippines cannot send inspectors overseas unlike the US FDA, it can forge a working relationship with the said agency and with similar agencies established by other countries to have access to their data bases on sources of contaminated or counterfeit products for proper action.

MSU's Food Safety Policy Center had said that the level of fraud in the food trade estimated at $50 billion a year is just 10 percent shy of the total estimated trade in counterfeit goods and is likely to increase as food prices increase due to the global economic slowdown.

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