On November 2, Business and Economic Centre hosted the round table, which discussed the draft of food safety code. The meeting was organized in the frame of the ongoing project “Legislative Platform on Agriculture and Food Safety Issues”.The meeting was attended by the members of Parliament, also representatives of the relevant parliamentary committee staff:
- Deputy Chairman of the Parliament of Georgia
- Sector Economy and Economic Policy Committee
- Agrarian Issues Committee
- European Integration Committee
BEC also invited the international organizations, foreign experts and local NGOs to participate in the discussions. Aim of the meeting was to discuss the draft law and exchange information with the committees about the pending legislative changes.
NGOs have prepared the common document which consolidated all their comments and recommendations about the draft law. The main remarks were about the following issues:
- Implementation of the internal control system during the production
- Inspection of enterprises
- Penalty issue of enterprises
Beside these problems, participants also discussed other important issues which are connected to the new draft code, like bio-products, labeling system of the product, critical and non-critical details of discrepancy and establishment of referential laboratories. During the meeting, representative of the Delegation of the European Union to Georgia and foreign experts, who are analyzing the Georgian legislation on food safety, shared their opinion on this draft code. It appears that their comments coincide with the opinion of NGOs on majority of the problems identified in draft code. The main recommendation of the experts was to discuss the code in more details, it is not necessary to adopt it immediately as the country has the law on food safety, which more of less regulates the field. In other case adoption of the code may cause more serious problems in future than the producers have nowadays.
Business and Economic Centre will collect and summarize the comments and recommendations identified by the international organizations and NGOs, prepares the final document, which will be sent to the relevant committees.
