Ukraine improves food safety standards

Ukraine's food industry has experienced double-digit growth in the past couple of years, but food quality, safety and controls are still not close to international standards. Ukrainian food processing plants are inspected by internal sanitation experts and by experts from the Health Ministry. But according to experts, most laboratories in the country lack modern equipment or the funds necessary to upgrade them. Ukrainian Health Ministry spokesperson Anatoly Voloshyn said that food-manufacturing plants are inspected by regional government authorities, but are ultimately under the control of the Health Ministry, which collects and evaluates data provided by regional authorities. Hennady Kuznetsov, director of the National Analytical Centre (NAC), a private testing laboratory in Kyiv, said the lack of modern equipment at the nation's labs makes accurate testing difficult. "It is unclear how safe Ukrainian food truly is,"​ Kuznetsov said. "This uncertainty means we have to act now to improve food quality standards and safety testing in the country."​ According to Kuznetsov, ensuring quality control will do more than protect the health of the nation; it will also give a boost to the economy. "It is very difficult to export food products from Ukraine because our food safety policies are very different from those in the West,"​ Kuznetsov said. The first step is to get the nation's laboratories up to international standards, which is the purpose of a program funded by Technical Assistance for the CIS (Tacis). According to that project found that pollution from the Chernobyl nuclear accident and from heavy industrialization had contaminated the nation's food products. The current Tacis program, already in its second year, aims at helping local manufacturers improve safety standards and at bringing their plants into compliance with international standards, said deputy project director Yulia Burmistenko. Tacis wants to improve the plants to standards under the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), a food safety compliance system established in the United States 40 years ago. "Our testing laboratory hopes to achieve HACCP accreditation this fall,"​ NAC's Kuznetsov said. That would make NAC the first Ukrainian food-testing lab accredited by a respectable international food compliance group.