What packaging? Meat is taken out from `Zhiguli’ truck
Fri, 12/14/2012 – 15:37
It will be naïve to think that the list of the companies involved in
the sausage production that had violated the law is limited to those
21 that were fined by the decision of the State Commission for the
Protection of the Economic Competition of the RA (SCPEC) from December
10 this year. In reality the number of law violators is much bigger. A
question appears why the Commission ignored the others and did not use
the force of the law towards others that fell in the jurisdiction of
its competences and obligations. We are expecting the answer of the
Commission, the sooner the better. We almost have no doubts that
before it happens the representatives of our society will try to
answer this question based on their suppositions.
Of course the scope of the violations and issues which are out of the
jurisdiction of the indicated Commission is much wider. The State Food
Safety Inspectorate of the RA Ministry of Agriculture must reveal the
law violators and take necessary measures to bring them accountable.
According to the RA Government decision no. 1560-N on confirming the
technical procedure of meet and meet products from 19.10.2006, the
meet and meet products must be packed separately or together by means
of substances, which will guarantee the safety of the production
during its preservation, transportation and selling. You will be
lucky, though, to see packed products. If you stand beside the sellers
of meet at the `Armenian market’ (GUM market) you will see almost with
no exception how the meet is removed from the car without any
packaging, very often even from the motor cars’ trunk.
According to the same Government decision the consumer containers and
packaging substances must be resistant to 20 mbar/kpa pressure, must
preserve hermeticity, the brazing seams must be symmetric, without
pores in order to exclude the possibility of water or air influx or
the drain of the content.
The substances by means of which the meet and meet products are
packaged, according to the indicated decision must be thermo-resistant
up to C 95 (+/-5), as well as resistant to water, gas, acid, base
liquids, dishwashing-detergent environments. It’s clear that such
strict requirements are conditioned with security reasons, but when
the demands are compared with the reality, one starts thinking whether
the Government decision was made not to be implemented or the
indicated Commission enforces it by preferences, in other words, when
and towards whom it wants to enforce it.
Artur Hovhannisyan