New measures in place for trade of produce

Consumers of farm produce will soon be buying commodities by the pounds or kilograms instead of by the heap or sack.{{more}}

At a press conference hosted by the St Vincent and the Grenadines Bureau of Standards at Campden Park, on November 5, chairman of the National Standards Council Dr Coleen Phillips, announced that the Bureau would be making efforts to implement the change.

She said that It is important that this policy be implemented, in order to better monitor production in the country.

“For a very long time in the Ministry of Agriculture and on farms, you would hear about the sale of a sack of produce, or the sale of a head of an animal, or the sale of a heap of produce.

“That’s one of the things we are going to be zooming in on, in the next couple months, because it is necessary that we try to start to bring about a sense of business entrepreneurship within farms and on farms.

“How do you measure how many kilograms or tons of dasheen was sold if we have the measurement in way of sacks for example? There are lots of benefits to be derived, once regulations are put in place.”

Ezra Ledger, director of the Bureau, also announced that his agency would soon begin the calibration of balls used in the conduct of lottery games, as part of the Conformity Assessment Programme.

The validation process would involve the verification of the physical dimension of the balls, and would be done in an effort to bring further confidence and trust into the games, by having the Bureau authenticate the consistency of the balls.

“We would be doing dimension analysis. We would be verifying their mass and their dimension, to see if they are uniform throughout, because these aspects can have implications on the games of chance.

“We have already established most of the standard operational procedures to these verifications.

“The programme will commence very soon, so persons could know when they are playing these games of chance that the balls would have been additionally verified by an independent third party, the Bureau of Standards.

The standards officials indicated a number of other initiatives that the Bureau would be working on implementing in the not too distant future, including the correct labelling of goods and services and the verification of hollow concrete blocks.

“We at the Bureau of Standards want to ensure consumer confidence within a national framework that pertains to all issues of trade, health, safety and quality assurance” Phillips stated. (JJ)