4 month delay in food grading label & 61 rats at Geylang Serai market: Has NEA been complacent?

4 month delay in food grading label & 61 rats at Geylang Serai market: Has NEA been complacent?

According to the NEA website here, it is the “leading public organization responsible for improving and sustaining a clean and green environment in Singapore.”

Two of its stated missions are:

1. Public hygiene and cleanliness: Conducts regular checks on food establishments, cooling towers, swimming pools, and public toilets to ensure a high standard of hygiene is maintained.

2. Management of hawker centers: Oversees the licensing, management and regulation of hawkers to maintain and promote good hygiene practices and public health standards in government hawker centres.

It was revealed that the Geylang Serai stalls were told about their new food hygiene grades last December, but had not received their labels until now.

An NEA spokesman said it viewed the four-month delay ’seriously’ and had tightened its operations to prevent a recurrence, adding that the new labels marked a ‘fresh start’ following the market’s two-day spring cleaning and pest control works last week. (read article here)

We are glad NEA has the decency to admit that the four month delay is unacceptable unlike the PAP leaders who have been quick to shift the blame for the disaster to Singaporeans.

On hindsight, the Indian rojak stall should have been failed in the grading and not allowed to operate till it improved on its hygiene standards.

It is a joke that it was still displaying its old “B” grade which might have given its customers a false sense of security. A “B” grade implies a “greater than average” standard of hygiene.

How a stall given this grade turns out to be a culprit for causing the worst food poisoning outbreak in Singapore leading to two deaths is anybody’s guess.

It is clear that NEA has been complacent in the following aspects:

1. Frequency of spot checks on eating outlets is inadequate.

2. Hygiene grading system has failed to reflect the true state of hygiene at the implicated food stalls.

3. Failure to detect the presence of rats at the Geylang Serai market only till now.

To compound matters, while the updated hygiene grade labels were collecting dust in NEA’s office, customers were misled by the old labels to patronize stalls which they would otherwise avoided.

It is not true that most diners are not bothered by the labels as reported by the media. There will be Singaporeans who deliberately avoid those stalls with a “C” grade and below out of hygiene concerns.

As Deputy chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee for National Development and the Environment Lee Bee Wah rightly pointed out: ‘By the time the results of the grading are out, conditions at the stalls could have changed’.

The hygiene grading system was put in place to serve two purposes:

1. To increase the standard of public hygiene at food outlets.

2. To enable Singaporeans to make an informed choice.

The unfortunate Geylang Serai food poisoning episode has exposed the flaws of both NEA’s grading system and its enforcement.

How can food stalls infested with rats be given a “B” or even “C” grading? Does NEA consider dining with 61 rats an acceptable standard of hygiene?

Why did NEA take so long to give out the new labels? Surely it defeats the purpose of conducting spot checks and grading the stalls in the first place if the updated labels are not displayed in time. Can we blame the Indian rojak stallholder from displaying the old label when the new one was not sent to him?

As always in the past, a major damage control operation will be instituted only after a terrible blunder has been made. Without the incident being put under intense public scrutiny by the mainstream media, will the new labels been given out and the rats caught in double quick time?

Some stallholders who were downgraded to a C saw the move as a knee-jerk reaction to Singapore’s worst case of mass food poisoning and rightly so.

Instead of reacting immediately to salvage its battered reputation, NEA should wait till its own internal investigations are complete before releasing a report to the public. What are the areas of inadequacies and what have been done to address them?

It is really quite pointless to “show” Singaporeans that they are doing “something” only after two deaths are lost. As a public agency paid for by taxpayers, Singaporeans have the right to demand for the highest degree of accountability and transparency for NEA.

Who is responsible for this delay in the giving out of the new hygiene labels? Who has been conducting checks at the Geylang Serai market? The implicated officers should be sacked or at least demoted to send a warning to others that such sloppy work will not be tolerated in the civil service.

Nothing less than an open and complete report on what went wrong in the process of enforcement can NEA assauge public fury and disappointment over this preventable tragedy.

The Minister of Environment Dr Yaacob, his Permanent Secretary Mr Tan Yong Soon and NEA CEO Andrew Tan owe every Singaporeans, especially the families of the deceased a public apology.

Mr Tan Yong Soon wrote in the Straits Times last December that “Taking five weeks leave from work is not as difficult as one thinks. Most times, when you are at the top, you think you are indispensable. But if you are a good leader who has built up a good team, it is possible to go away for five weeks or even longer.”

This is the result of a “good” leader who has built up a “good” team to cover his duties when he was away for 5 weeks which is more than enough time for NEA to send the updated food hygiene labels to the stallholders.

In all fairness, Singaporeans have not been “complacent” in maintaining public hygiene as insinuated by Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong and Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan.

It was NEA which had been complacent in the discharge of its duties. They must have assumed that such an outbreak will never happen in a first world country like Singapore. It did and it is time we review the performance of every ministry, statutory board and quasi-government agencies like NEA to ensure that we are paying the right price for the right man to do the right job.

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