New Delhi: Making it clear that the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) does not have the power to prescribe the standards of food meant for animal consumption, the Delhi High Court Tuesday ruled that its authority extends only to food meant for human consumption.
Setting aside an official note which said that milk and meat-producing animals, excluding poultry, pig and fish, cannot be fed with feed containing meat or bone meal, a bench of Chief Justice D.K. Upadhyay and Tejas Karia ruled, “The provisions of the FSSAI Act, 2006 are only in relation to regulating food for human consumption, which in our opinion, as per the scheme of the Act and its object, would not include cattle feed or animal feed.”
Section 16 clearly defines the duties and functions of the FSSAI, including its task of regulating and monitoring the manufacture, processing, distribution, sale and import of food so as to ensure safe and wholesome food. Expressions such as ‘food safety’, ‘primary food’, ‘unsafe food’, ‘sale of food’ found in various provisions of the Act “could not include any feed or food not meant for human consumption such as cattle feed or animal feed”, the court said.
The court was acting on a challenge to a note attached to Regulation 2.5.2 of the Food Safety and Standards (Food Products Standards and Food Additives) Regulations, 2011, which said that milk- and meat-producing animals, excluding poultry, pig and fish, shall not be fed with feed containing meat or bone meal including internal organs, blood meal and tissue of bovine- or porcine-origin materials except milk and milk products.
A company by the name of Godrej Agrovet, which deals with manufacturing of animal feed had challenged the note, saying that the FSSAI exceeded its statutory power under the 2006 Act.
Apart from this, the FSSAI had also mandated that commercial feeds shall comply with BIS or Bureau of Indian Standards, as specified by the FSSAI under Section 4 of the Act. This was also challenged by the petitioners. “Commercial feeds shall comply with the relevant BIS standards, as may be specified by the Food Authority from time to time, and carry BIS certification mark on the label of the product,” the note had specified.
The court made it clear, however, that the FSSAI could not make BIS certification mandatory for animal feed, as this fell outside its purview.
Making any BIS standard mandatory is the function of the Centre. It added that the Bureau created under the BIS Act of 2016, was not competent to make the BIS standard mandatory for commercial feed for the reason that the FSSAI “lacks any such jurisdiction to make any such Regulation”, the court ruled in its 45-page judgement.
Simply put, the court stated that making BIS certification a necessity was also beyond the scope of the Act, 2006, because the Bureau of Indian Standards Act, 2016 provides that compliance with BIS standards “is voluntary and not mandatory”.
Apart from this, the court noted that the very objective of the 2006 Act is to consolidate laws relating to food and to establish the FSSAI for laying down science-based standards for articles of food and to regulate their manufacture, storage, distribution, sale and import, to ensure availability of safe and wholesome food “for human consumption”.
Moreover, the court relied on Section 3(1)(j) of the 2006 Act, which defines “food” as a substance for human consumption.
“In absence of specific inclusion of any substance as food for animal consumption or cattle feed or feed for animal in the definition clause, in our considered opinion, all the functions of the Food Authority vested in Section 16 and duties cast on it are in relation to food for human consumption and will not include the animal or cattle feed,” the court ruled.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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