Provincial food authority to get its own lab

The Sindh Food Authority (SFA), which is responsible for testing the quality of food items in the province, will soon be setting up its own testing laboratory. Development work for the facility is reportedly underway through the assistance of the University of Karachi (KU).

Up until now, the provincial food authority did not have a testing facility of its own and all food testing and laboratory work was carried out by the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (PCSIR) and through two private laboratories.

The SFA is stated to be in dire need of its own testing laboratory to streamline its operations and impose better quality control standards for foods sold by food operators in the province.

According to Sindh Food Authority Director Operations Muhammad Taufeeq, there has been tremendous progress in the development of SFA’s food testing laboratory. The provincial government too has released a budget worth Rs100 million for the project.

“The facility is being set up in collaboration with KU, for which a memorandum of understanding (MoU) will soon be signed by the two provincial institutions. Once the development work is complete, we expect the laboratory to be operational as early as next year,” informed Taufeeq.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, the food authority’s director operations said that it has been almost two years since the establishment of his department and over 2,200 food operators have been registered during this period. “The registration of food operators was severely affected in major cities, including Karachi, due to the global pandemic situation and subsequent lockdowns. During this period, all food and brink businesses were forced to come to a complete halt,” he said.

Elaborating further, the SFA director shared that although businesses slowly resumed operations after the lockdown phase, the damage caused during this period has been hard to recover from for many business owners. “It still haunts many businesses, which is why the number of food license holders in Karachi is low and needs to at least be increased to 3,000 by the end of this year,” he asserted.

According to SFA Senior Officer Faraz Ali Soomro, even though the department has been able to successfully expand its network in Hyderabad, Larkana and Mirpurkhas, the metropolitan city of Karachi still houses the largest number of registered food operators in the province. “We are working towards further expanding our network province-wide, and will soon be available across all major cities of Sindh,” Soomro told The Express Tribune.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 25^th, 2020.