Making Them Like They Used To

On the morning of Wednesday, May 8, 2013, Adanech, 45, went to a bakery located around Somali Tera, where she lives, to buy bread using the 12 Br that she had in her pocket. She was going on with a routine that she has been following for the last ten years.

“A couple of years ago, I only spent four Birr to purchase four pieces of bread,” Adanech told Fortune, as she reached for the few pieces of bread, wrapped in plastic, that the baker handed her. “It was enough to fill my children’s bellies.”

Like her, many shop for staple items like bread and injera everyday, without thinking of all that goes into putting them on the market. They are easy to find even in small shops in residential areas, and if customers are middle or upper income, they might not even notice the difference. However, without regulations, the size and quality of consumable items can fluctuate rapidly when prices change.

“Although the prices have only increased by a small bit over the years, I have to budget more money to buy more bread, in order to feed my children properly,” she told Fortune. “The sizes are becoming smaller and smaller.”

The importance of basic food items was not lost on the government as it took steps to stabilise prices by setting standards and introducing price caps to regulate the market.

Even with the implementation of the price caps on bread and 15 other basic consumable items being lifted year and a half ago, the government was still left with properly enforcing mandatory standards on 221 consumable goods to protect the interest of consumers, like Adanech Kasaye, who buys bread everyday to feed her children.

Although Adanech visited a couple of bakeries around her neighbourhood in search of bread with decent sizes like she used to buy a couple of years ago, her efforts were to no avail.

“I am forced to buy 10 pieces of bread because there is no one to control the bakeries,” she complained.

What she doesn’t know is that the government put in place a mandatory minimum requirement for bread a couple years ago, in order to safeguard consumers like her.

Starting from 2011, the Ethiopian Standards Agency (ESA), which develops and implements the national standardization strategy, began identifying about 221 consumable products which are required to fulfil the national standards.

The ESA has been hard at its task since its inception in February 2011 when the former Quality and Standards Authority (QSA) split into four independent bodies. The other institutions include the Ethiopian Conformity Assessment Enterprise (ECAE), the National Metrology Institute (NMI), and the National Accreditation Office (NAO).

Established during the Dergue regime, in 1987, as the Ethiopian Authority for Standardisation (EAS), the former QSA was re-established twice in 1998 and again in 2004.

QSA published the first group of 108 Ethiopian Standards back in 1973 following the, then functional, consensus based committee procedure. Until 2010, there were 1,190 Ethiopian Standards in 20 fields, of which agriculture and food technology; and textile and leather technology were prominent in number.

Since its establishment, ESA has formulated about 5,000 different standards, 221 of which are mandatory. The Agency is planning to prepare an additional 10,000 standards before the end of the Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) in 2015.

The functions related to standards, quality control, inspection, testing, certification, and metrology used to all be provided by the QSA.

However, the government revoked the power of governing standards for products from the ESA and gave it to the Ministry of Trade (MoT). It limited the ESA’s powers to simply formulating the standards.

The ESA is the designated national authority (DNA) responsible for the development and publication of Ethiopian standards. It is also responsible for providing training and technical assistance to factories using accepted scientific methods.

Ethiopian standards may be either mandatory or voluntary. Mandatory standards have the full force of the law behind them as do other technical regulations in Ethiopia. Violations or failure to enforce mandatory standards can be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. They are given such powers because they concern the protection of human health, personal property and safety and related issues.

All standards that fall outside of these characteristics are considered voluntary.

The application of mandatory standards includes food items, drinking water, fruits and vegetables. This means food items including bread and Injera produced in the country, are obliged to meet the regulations of the ESA.

Alarmed by the rise in the prices of basic consumer goods, the Ministry of Trade (MoT) was forced to issue a regulation in order to implement the standards set by the QSA. One of the requirements in the regulation issued in December, 2011 concerned the minimum weight for a single piece of bread and Injera, two of the most widely consumed items in the country.

According to the Regulation, the minimum net mass of bread after it is baked, should be 100 grams for a loaf and 350 grams for a piece of Injera.

Adanach, however, doesn’t know about these specifications.

“I eat bread all the time, but I don’t know anything about the requirements’’, she told Fortune.

After the ESA formulates the standards, implementation will be left to different designated government agencies, according to Daniel Zenebe, Public Relations head at the ESA.

“These mandatory standards are not being applied properly,” said Daniel. “It is our day to day job to hear the complaints of consumers that are being affected by substandard goods.”

Daniel told Fortune that the Agency has been using the media to disseminate the necessary information.

Officials from the Addis Ababa Trade and Industry Bureau say that the problem can observed on both over the quality and the quantity of products on the market.

“It is extremely challenging to trace every single item on the market since we have limited manpower,” Aberham Mi’a, senior officer of Legal Metrology at the Bureau told Fortune.

Producers of basic consumable items give different reasons for their failure to meet set standards.

A manager of a prominent bakery anonymously told Fortune that the size of bread varies depending on the supply of flour in the market.

This bakery is supplied with about 450ql of flour every month from the government, at 796 Br a quintal. If there is a shortage of supply from the government, the company buys its flour from other sources, at 830 Br a quintal and unilaterally makes the decision on the weight of a piece of bread it bakes, according the manager.

After the price cap on bread was lifted in June 2011, but the one on flour was kept intact, the government resorted to controlling the supply chain of flour by distributing it mainly through its importer and distributor, the Ethiopian Grain Market Enterprise (ETGE).

Under its scheme, millers are sold wheat based on their production capacity, as registered with the MoT.

Yet, this failed to solve the problem, as supplies could not meet the demand. To solve this problem the government bought 300,000tn of wheat, at a cost of 94 million dollars, in August 2011. It was intended to replenish some of the borrowed wheat from the national reserves, as well as flood the markets to decrease the prices at the time.

The government imported 887,045tn of wheat during the 2010 fiscal year, which was distributed to large flour factories based on their sales volume.

“We usually get less wheat flour than we require.” the manager says. “Since the price of flour increases when we buy from the retail market, we reduce the weight of each piece of bread to maintain our profit margins.”

The official at the Addis Ababa Trade and Industry Bureau does not deny the lack of proper follow-up.

“We have limited human capacity,” he said. “There is only so much we can do.”

The lack of coordination among different government agencies adds to the problem, according to Aberham.

However, industry observers point their fingers at the ESA’s lack of authority and power to implement these standards.

“In order to fulfil the objectives of the ESA it is essential to empower the Agency with certain tasks,” according to a private consultant, who worked at the former Quality & Standards Authority.

Giving proper authority to the Agency is essential to implement standards properly and to protect consumers like Adanach from unfair trade practices, according to him.

 

 


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.