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Do we have food safety and quality?

Politiko 2025-04-13 15:02:41

Do we have food safety and quality?

At a time when we should be focused on food quality, Albanian consumers are still in the dilemma of whether or not they have safe food, and this is due to the scandals of the last few days which raise a big question mark about their safety.

According to the food safety expert, Renata Kongoli, a pedagogue and at the Faculty of Biotechnology and Food, the guarantee of safety is achieved only with the proper functioning of the system, the development of laboratories and the qualification of human resources.

"Each subject should have its own self-control laboratory, to check not only the part of the risk and the part of the quality of food products because we as consumers buy the product for the nutritional values it has. So we don't buy it whether the product is safe or not. It must be 100 percent guaranteed. The laboratory infrastructure has costs and a part of our entities, which are mainly medium and small, find it impossible to implement the self-control plan from the point of view of internal analyses and should be obliged to the official control laboratories. The laboratory infrastructure of these official laboratories is not at the level it should be", says food safety expert Renata Kongoli.

The greatest attention of inspections should be on meat products because they have a greater risk to consumers.

"Products of animal origin are higher risk products, seafood products are higher risk. Products that generally contain more protein, they also have a higher risk. We import many products and the wide range of products that are imported simultaneously requires more specialized inspections and analyses and various diversification analyses. This makes the laboratories that at the point, at the customs, must definitely be, constantly strengthened, as well as human resources in the sense of acting quickly, providing information quickly", explains Kongoli.

According to the expert, regional agricultural directorates should be closer to farmers to advise them on the type of pesticides they should use.

"Directorates that are exemptions or agriculture directorates, which should be close to the farmer, they should advise, they should train, both for the amount of pesticide should be used, and for the time after use in the sense that this pesticide does not break down and does not pose a risk to the consumer", the expert further added.

Additives in food products are another problem according to Kongoli.

"Inspection takes for granted that they are necessary additives that are added to a certain product. But what composition these supplements have and what side effects they have, so this situation is not clear. There is a standard that is used in the case of dairy products that is the content of palm oil, to which by-products it should be added and how it should be declared on the label", concludes Renata Kongoli.

During the first months of 2025, Albanian consumers have encountered a series of cases that violate food safety, starting from mandarins, meat with salmonella, strawberries with pesticides or peppers or milk with palm oil./ Klan News

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