Members of the food chain are more disciplined year by year

In Hungary people’s trust in food products has never been shaken. Not even six years ago, during the paprika scandal. Nevertheless, the bird flue did some harm to chicken farmers. Since Hungary’s accession to the EU there have been several minor food safety issues, mostly in connection with foreign-made food products. Two years after EU accession Hungarian food safety experts started speaking about rebuilding people’s trust in food products. Well, in the past couple of decades it was not considered an achievement that food products were safe in stores or at the marketplace. Although it is true that there were fewer products on the shelves.

Hungarian authorities have come to realise that the best ally is always the public, so they started speaking openly about their actions to uncover illegal meat processing plants and the like. Consumers are happy that the authorities are paying attention instead of them. But controls are not enough, consumer support is also essential. As part of this, consumers need to be educated, for instance by good retailers and by good product labels. Central Agricultural Office (MgSZH) controls food production and agricultural activities; chairman László Lukács told our magazine that last year they detected 79 suspicious events that caused 1,124 illnesses – after the examinations it was revealed that bad food caused 53 cases in which 1,035 people got ill. MgSzH routinely checks manufacturers and distributors, last year they implemented more than 70,000 control examinations and imposed more than HUF 180 million worth of fines during the summer vacation and before holidays.

The organisation’s budget is HUF 40 billion, out of which 16 billion is comes from state funds. RASFF is a system that operates in the member states of the European Union. The organisation received 97 notifications and 39 reports in connection with Hungary, out which 54 were alerts of high food safety risk. All these ‘RASFF events’ (e.g. melamine contamination of Chinese milk products, honey adulteration, etc.) were swiftly managed and not a single harmful product reached consumers. Dr Miklós Süth, Hungary’s chief veterinary officer told our magazine that entrepreneurs in the food sector are more prepared than before and take legislation more seriously. He added that MgSzH’s regional offices regularly check members of the food chain, with a varying frequency of 1-5 years. In 2010, 53 NGOs initiated a change in regulations, which would facilitate Hungarian food products’ entry into the market – this might create new jobs, but at the same time also poses new food safety risks.

While in the European Union food safety regulations are the same in each ember state, in the case of importing from third countries phytosanitary certificates are issued by relevant authorities to guarantee that the products meet the necessary requirements. Imported products that do not meet these requirements are blocked by phytosanitary authorities and they publish reports on this to inform member states through the EUROPHYT system. It is MgSzH’s task to regularly cooperate with the European Commission, OECD, UN/ECE and FAO/WHO. One of the biggest concerns these days is that domestic and imported fruits and vegetables contain pesticide residues. In six laboratories 2,741 examinations were carried out and from the 1,715 domestic samples 0.8 percent raised concerns; from the 1,026 samples imported from EU member sates and third countries 0.8 percent were found problematic – all in all, compared with 2008, fewer samples went above the threshold, but the number of samples with residues lower than the threshold remained rather high.

The number of decisions to impose fines and the total number of fines imposed in 2009:
Animal feed control fines: 50; Sum: HUF 36, 830, 216 • Food control fines: 2,175; Sum: HUF 325, 836,765 • Food chain supervision fines: 1,624; Sum: HUF 235, 193448 • Total number of fines: 3,849