MEETING MEAT REQUIREMENTS: AG MINISTRY TO ENFORCE REGULATION FOR CONSUMER SAFETY
- As Agriculture officials promised, consumers in Armenia will soon have no more reason to feel worried about the safety of the meat they buy here. Starting in April, commercial use of meat not rendered in a state-approved slaughterhouse will be banned.
“How can we speak about exporting products to the European Union if inside the country we cannot provide our own population with safe food. During the last six months (of 2007), the State Food Safety and Veterinary Inspection (SFSVI) established last May, revealed 761 violations out of 800 inspections, imposing fines of a total of about 50 million drams (about $163,000),” Agriculture Minister David Lokyan said.
Gevorg Tovmasyan, the Inspection’s Deputy Head says cases of sale of infected meat in the last two years were prevented in advance: “Meat infected with anthrax had been revealed, but the sale was prevented and it did not reach the population.”
“We can ban the slaughter of cattle outside slaughterhouses even tomorrow, but there are not enough slaughterhouses yet. Nevertheless, we will do everything for the minister’s words to become a reality by the time he mentioned,” Tovmasyan says.
“The advantage of a slaughterhouse is obvious – sanitary and hygienic conditions are maintained, after the slaughter meat, raw materials and tailings are controlled. If a sick animal is slaughtered in the village, the blood can infect other animals; in a slaughterhouse it is excluded,” he adds.
There are only five slaughterhouses in Armenia, with two located in the Shirak province (in Gyumri and Tashir) and in Kotayk, Syunik and Ararat provinces.
The Assistance to Agricultural Development international organization will reconstruct and technically re-equip the slaughterhouses in Ararat and Kotayk, and a new one will be built in Aragatsotn province. “Only the problem of having a slaughterhouse in Tavush remains unsolved,” Tovmasyan says. “About 700-800,000 Euros ($1-1.2m) will be provided for the implementation of the program.”
Currently, in all communities of the country where there are no slaughterhouses, animals are slaughtered simply in the yards. According to the Law “On Food Safety” adopted in 2007, the community’s veterinarian must take part in the slaughter as he is to conduct a corresponding examination and issue a corresponding accompanying document for the transportation of meat.
Sevak Harutyunyan, who has worked as a butcher at one of the supermarkets in the capital’s South-Western district (“Bangladesh”) for four years, says the meat passes another examination at the sales outlet. “Re-sellers bring to the store meat that was examined by a vet in the village. Here it is inspected by the district veterinarian who takes a sample for an examination every morning and seals the meat with a stamp with his name and surname to confirm its safety.”
He says that in reality one can understand just from how meat looks whether the animal had been sick or not: “But it happened often that people who have no idea about meat but are engaged in meat sale purchased diseased meat from re-sellers attracted by its low price.”
Meat on sale at markets and stores is checked at one of 12 laboratories licensed by the Ministry of Agriculture.
The reality in rural areas is slaughtering animals and selling meat to neighbors. “Even in that case the veterinarian must examine the animal to be slaughtered, since after all it is public food and hundreds of people will eat the meat of that animal,” Tovmasyan says.
Still, slaughtering without a vet’s permission – and risking a fine of 30,000-400,000 drams ($100-$1,300) – is widely practiced throughout Armenia’s 867 villages. Some villagers don’t even know such a law exists prohibiting the practice.
A villager in Hayanist in the Ararat region (who did not give his name for fear of prosecution), slaughtered a pig in December, sold most of the meat to his neighbors, and some was consumed by his own family.
“I did not know I was supposed to invite a veterinarian, I don’t know about our village’s veterinarian either, my children also ate that meat, we took a good care of that pig, never let it out of the shed, so it wouldn’t be sick,” the man says.
Only Satenik Tokhyan, who is engaged in an animal slaughter business at the store in the center of Hayanist turns to the village’s veterinarian Tornik Grigoryan for examining the animal to be slaughtered and getting a document of permission.
“First I check whether it was sick or not, I check its temperature, only then I issue a certificate,” says Grigoryan, who thinks that slaughtering animals at slaughterhouses is a positive step, since “no sick meat will enter the market.”
The SFSVI deputy head gives assurances that as slaughterhouses are put into operation the inspection with try to do away with slaughters in the yard.
Chairman of the Union for the Protection of Consumers’ Interests Abgar Yeghoyan says that the slaughter of animals in sanitary conditions is long overdue, since “it first of all proceeds from safety requirements.”
“I am unequivocally for slaughterhouses. You should have seen meat on sale in two or three rows in streets near the market in Yerevan’s Malatia-Sebastian community, only 40-50 centimeters above ground, and it was in the case when cases of foot-and-mouth disease and African fever were registered in Armenia in 2007,” Yeghoyan says.
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- 1830 Following Sultan Mahmood's decree and the advice of the French, British, and Russian ambassadors, the Armenian Catholics in Turkey were given a Patriarchate and their own administrative organization.
- 1888 Birth, in Constantinople, of the actor Vahram Papazyan. He is considered to have no equal in the Armenian theater.
- 1906 Birth of composer Ashot Satian. He died in 1958.
- 1911 Birth of theater personality Gevorg Ashughyan.
- 1990 Start of hostilities between Armenian and Azeri Turkish forces near Raskh.
- 2001 The French Senate recognizes the 1915 Genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
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