Regulatory body to check food quality

Recently there has been a lot of furore over the sensitive imported food items like milk and related products in the Bangladesh market. Though there were no immediate reports of Bangladeshi children taken ill following consumption of Chinese or any other foreign-brand milk powder, the scare was widespread. People spontaneously stopped buying the melamine-contaminated milk brands. The government, too, was awakened to the issue and went into action to stop the marketing and sale of that particular brands of imported milk and allied products.
As everyone knows, the reports of children falling seriously ill in China after taking locally produced milk caused a great outcry all over the world. The cause of the public outrage was that the culprit brand of milk contained melamine that was beyond permissible limit. As a result, thousands of Chinese children fell victim to the melamine contamination in their own home brand of milk. As a follow-up development, the public in Bangladesh and the government here responded to the crisis after it had already happened elsewhere. But to lock the stable-door after the horse has already bolted is not the proper way to address any problem, especially one having its bearing on public health.
The ideal approach to deal with any such problem having to do with public health and, more specially, children's health, there should be preventive arrangements already in place. In the advanced countries, their governments have such arrangement in the form of strong regulatory bodies, whose function is to check the quality and control the marketing of both locally produced and imported food and related products. In this context, it is reassuring to learn that the government of Bangladesh, too, is mulling over creation of such a regulatory watchdog to bring under strict scrutiny the quality of imported as well as locally produced food items. However, since the government is in still short of adequate manpower equipped with the necessary skill and expertise, it will take two years' time to implement the idea of forming such a regulatory body.
Since materialisation of the idea of constituting such a watchdog body will take some time, the government, as a stopgap measure, has also been contemplating forming a high-level inter-ministerial committee to deal with the evil practice of contamination and adulteration of food products in the country. It has been further learnt that there will also be a technical committee to help the inter-ministerial body to discharge its responsibilities of checking contamination in, and adulteration of, food products. The plan of putting a strong regulatory body in place to control the quality of food and related products is certainly an excellent idea and it deserves to be appreciated. The idea of creating a high-powered inter-ministerial committee that is supposed to function during the interim period until formation of the watchdog body only bears out the seriousness of the government to continue work and not sit idle in the intervening time.
Formation of a regulatory body to check quality and then certify food items before they are marketed has been overdue since long. And once a food product enters the market without proper quality check, little remains to be done. What one can do at best is to take damage-limitation measures. So far, just that has been done here. But that move too, was being taken when any case of death or illness as a result of taking a poisonous food item did come to notice. There are yet no correct statistics about how many adults and children of the country have lost their lives or been crippled for life after consuming untested food products that contained life threatening substances like the one detected in the milk in China. Therefore, the step taken by the government to form the regulatory body, though late, is still welcome. All concerned would hope that the watchdog body to be created to check the quality of food items will reduce the hazards the unsuspecting consumers are exposed to.