November 16, 2008

Food safety in Mongolia

Food safety in Mongolia
Nowadays everybody started talking about this topic quite seriously. Not only the people, but the government is still pretending to be paying attention to food safety. For example, they once announced 2008, the year of food safety. But, as I feel, this year had to be called anti- food safety because there were so many incidents which made us feel horrible. I hope that you all remember that from the very beginning of New Year, there were massive amounts of people poisoned in vodka. This took 15 people’s life and over 200 people were poisoned. Moreover, canned foods, ramen /noodle/ and rice with insect, poisoned so many people.
As former "socialist" country Mongolia started political and economical transition in early 1990s and opened its market to introduce free market economy. Mongolia was a food exporting country and domestic needs were well met by the national production until 1991. Total sector production had decreased 3 times in 1995 and 1.5 times in 2000 compared to production in 1991. At present 70% percent of flour needed are imported from other countries, for instance. Also, 9.7% of foods were out of the expiration date, 28.7% were failing to meet frozen condition (in March), and 14.6% were improperly packaged. These are the present situation of Mongolian food safety.
We need healthy and balanced foods; therefore we need to know some tips about food. You may all know about those things, but I hope you will get some points out of it.
  • First of all, we need to check the production date to check when it expires.
  • Buy domestic products as possible as you can. But, I don’t mean to buy those that can’t exactly supply our needs.
  • Make people know the defects you experienced with particular products. It can prevent a lot of people from poisoning.
  • Don’t buy low-quality products even if they were the cheapest.
  • Good packaged products are not the ideal choice to buy. Because in one saying, the worst thing is wrapped in nice paper.

All in all, you must be smart buyer and since you are the leader of your body and mind, you have to discriminate the product that is healthy for you.

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