Nigerian Government’s food safety initiative gets EU support

The European Union (EU) funded National Quality Infrastructure (NQI) project has extended its support to the federal ministry of Nigeria to give a push to the implementation of the national policy on food safety.

Initiated by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) in Abuja, the activity is aimed at creating awareness about techniques of food handling and seeking to eliminate high risk foods from Nigerian market.

The project will also involve work on improving food manufacturing procedures to encourage food exports from Nigeria.

The EU along with UNIDO had initiated the NQI in July 2013 by signing an agreement to support Nigeria to improve its quality infrastructure.

Nigeria’s food safety initiative would take into consideration cross-cutting themes on trade, agriculture, health, environment, science and research.

To encourage trade in the country, the initiative would also include building quality infrastructure considerations in line with the World Trade Organization (WTO) Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) obligations.

The SPS obligations was set by WTO on member-states’ policies relating to food safety which included bacterial contaminants, pesticides, inspection and labelling.

According to a UNIDO statement: "The NQI initiative collaborated with the Ministry of Health to establish two supervisory bodies to oversee an integrated food safety control system for Nigeria and safeguard the mandates of the implementing government agencies, the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Food Safety (IMCFS) and the National Food Safety Management Committee (NFSMC)."

As a part of the initiative, about 40 laboratories have been set up in Lagos for proficiency testing.

The statement further revealed that experts from the NQI project visited Lagos to deliver a two-day capacity building programme to improve the competence of these laboratories to perform conformity assessment services.

As cited in The Guardian the ministry’s statement read: "Over 40 laboratories from across Nigeria participated in the knowledge management training course on Proficiency Testing (PT) schemes in accordance with ISO/IEC 17043.

"The selected laboratories operate testing facilities for the food and beverage industry and will be trained in units under the NQI Project to qualify them to apply for accreditation within the requirements of the ISO 17025 standard."