It is estimated that about six hundred million (600,000,000) people in the world get sick annually because they ate unsafe food. Out of this number 420,000 people die worldwide because the food they ate was unsafe. This is about 7.5% of the world population that is about 8 Billion people.
To highlight the need for coordinated, global efforts to address food safety issues, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) initiated this day that was first commemorated on 7th June 2019. Since then every 7th June the World commemorates this day reflecting on the challenges of unsafe food to the globe.
This year’s commemoration was held under the theme “Prepare for the unexpected“.
It is against this background that GEDA Uganda together with her Partners Global Consumer Center (CONSENT) and Kasese District Local Government commemorated this day in Kasese District engaging several District stakeholders including among others the District political and technical wing, the Religious leaders from the Anglican faith, Catholic and Moslem community, Security both police and UPDF, the media (Guide radio, Messiah FM, Light FM, UBC Ngeya, New Vision and Daily monitor) since these are key with the kind of audience they access.
Kasese District is one of the Districts among others that have suffered the effects of different kinds of unsafe food that may be linked to several illnesses as highlighted prior. The issues of using rodent poison in post harvest handling, the famous “Nsanga meat” (rotten meat), the bony fish, drying maize and cassava on tarmac roads and other rudimentary PHH methods that have led to severe aflatoxins especially in maize.
GEDA Uganda and partners conducted a number of activities including radio talk shows, trainings of the above mentioned categories on food safety and nutrition, road drives within the markets in Kasese Municipality preaching the gospel of safe food.
speaking at the inauguration of the week long activities in Verina Gardens the Chairperson Kasese District Mr.Eriphazi Muhindi Bukombi appreciated the efforts of the partners in fighting the bad food handling practices which he said the District was behind these efforts and would continue to support such interventions. He appreciated the Hon. District Councilors and the entire technical wing that had spared the day to come and get trained in food safety and nutrition and asked them to be ambassadors of the food safety message to their electorate. He said the District had picked interest in this subject matter during the World Consumer day in March when CONSENT and her partner GEDA engaged them on issues of consumer rights, food safety among other important aspects of life.
Facilitating at this inauguration training, the main Facilitator Mr. Bwambale Benard the head of programs at CONSENT emphasised the need for leaders to adhere to this message but also go ahead and preach the same because it would defeat logic for example why a number of leaders would speak about the same thing like Parish Development Model at a function and leave out key issues that directly affect the health and life of their people. He advised them to take on division of roles, for example an LCI chairperson would speak about PDM, a councilor speaks about food safety and a Chairperson speaks about nutrition. This way different messages would be passed to the gathering easily.
Benard took leaders into several engagements of food safety, nutrition and leaders at all levels appreciated the challenge at hand. Several leaders across board confessed having been victims of several issues for example not bothering about expiry dates on products, eating food cooked in polythene bags, misuse of agro-chemicals among others.
The team had a week long number of activities. Several participants pledged to be food safety ambassadors during their day to today engagements.
