All Dressed Up and Eating Doubles

13, Dec 1999
"Bottled water" has been advertised as the supreme potable product available on the local market. One was led to believe that the 17 brands of purified water could be consumed with one's eyes closed. Now to our dismay a Cariri report has revealed that some of these brands are contaminated with micro-organisms and chemicals that are inimical to our health.

Immediately, as is so typical here, everyone begins to pass the buck in an attempt to duck and shirk responsibility to the populace.

The clamour for a publication of the list of contaminated brands and the questions raised as to whether anyone has the legal right to so do, only serve to cloud the issue and provide officials with the semantics to cover their lack of will to act. The public trust has been betrayed and our very lives have been endangered as a result.

Once the state agency, in this case Cariri, has done the testing and the evidence has been provided, then the Ministry of Health and its Food and Drug Departments are charged with the overall responsibility to shut down the guilty firms.

We always seem to want to protect the guilty businessmen who have made their millions at the expense of a gullible, innocent populace. In this regard our governments, past and present, seem to all to have misunderstood the purpose of their being.

It is important that governments ensure that standards are set and maintained in the interest of the well-being of the people.
There seems to be a contradiction that our Government that expends so much through WASA to guarantee a public supply of potable water second to none in the Caribbean and Latin American region, that is presently spending millions of dollars to enhance the Caroni-Arena water project and to extend it further to the southern-most extremities of the island, that imports annually hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of chemicals such as alum, lime and chlorine to purify our public supply, etc would hesitate to apply sanctions on water privateers.

These private water products have only gained market presence owing to the negatives and resulting bad press associated with WASA over the years of gradual building in context of the population explosion expressed in terms of numbers and levels of expectations.

The popularity of bottled water has also been informed by the tendency of our "sophisticated" local elites to inculcate and acquire the tastes, styles and all that may be deemed fashionable internationally and can serve to separate and distinguish their goodly selves from the common herd of plebs.

So they are consuming bottled water in the metropoles and we simply follow the fad. Only in this case it is one fad that can most certainly lead to our graves, given the lack of integrity of some of our local entrepreneurs, the very people who are always carrying on about the inefficiencies of the government agencies and public service.

We must be hard on private enterprise as well, and precisely so because most of them seek unfair protection from government.
And we can say this because it has been a general trend over the years with a plethora of unscrupulous private businessmen fighting to dupe the gullible public with all the help they can get from their contacts in government.

Government chemists from time to time have reported the findings of faecal content in products such as "penna-cool" and "doubles", in fact the consistency of such findings in "doubles", a relative poor-man's sandwich, checked at random in the north, south, east and west of the country, has been described as quite alarming and disturbing. But no business is shut down, and no standards are established.

Instead, at the last conference of foreign delegations held in T&T, "doubles" from a stall, near UWI, that has no running water, was the highly touted delicacy provided for the foreign guests. In fact local authorities were at that very moment attempting to remove the very stall and the proprietors protested the action of the local authorities on the grounds that they had this contract from central government to provide "doubles" for the foreign delegates.

What madness! But so typical of what obtains here in T&T. And it is not unusual to see some citizen of substance outside UWI having a "doubles" while drinking bottled water. The innocent having a "double whammy"!
And there is enough historic precedent for this blatant disregard for the quality of what we consume.

Following the trends began in the last century, the Caribbean continued to import saltfish from Canada despite the fact that this once favoured food for slaves was by and large rejected, half-rotten Canadian cod, salted especially for disposal or dumping in the so-called Third World.

It became standard policy that whenever the food and drugs authorities in the Northern Hemisphere rejected food products, the manufacturers, in order to salvage profits, dumped their stuff anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

Recently when the Mad Cow disease almost destroyed the British beef industry, the Europeans immediately banned all imports from Britain. Today France still does, much to the chagrin of the British, who did everything possible, including the slaughter of millions of animals, to stem the tide of the disease.

In T&T no official precautions were put in place to protect our populace then. It was merely pointed out that most of our beef imports came from Australia and New Zealand, not Britain. Shows how innocent we are to the unscrupulous ways of the world.

And not surprisingly an Australian visitor to this country wrote the newspapers complaining that he had recognised "kangaroo" meat being disguised as beef on our local grocery shelves. The "good old roo" he termed it.

The point is that anything goes. And we remain asleep. The few locals who attempt to force our institutions to function intelligently and maintain standards are viewed as troublemakers and social nuisances.

But if we can ape so much of what obtains in the metropoles, how come we have never seen it fit to develop a Ralph Nader type consumer watch group? We need to give pride of place in our scheme of things and business affairs to the NGOs that have been teasing towards the right direction. We need to empower them in the interest of our well-being.

If we do not seize the power to determine the quality of what we consume, how can we ever hope to get to the level where we can stand up to the policies of the WTO and the terms of international trade as dictated by the most industrialised countries?

What shall we do with the second, third and fourth rounds of Seattle that are yet to come? And why weren't we there in the streets too, setting the pace and the guidelines, given the banana issue and its importance to Caribbean reality?

In the meantime, all dressed up in suits and ties, we shall continue to eat and drink "s..t" and sleep!

brenco@tstt.net.tt

'In this caseit is one fad that can lead to our graves'
'The point is that anything goes. And we remain asleep'