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26th November, 2011
PROTECTING GHANAIAN INDUSTRIES
Take heart, all of you aficionados of Star-Kist tuna; from housewives who swear that to make a pot of mouth watering, inexpensive jolloff rice the product is unrivalled to students who say that it is always at the top of their list of provisions.
To protect their health, and save them from throwing away money on imitation products, which was becoming a problem, the Star Kist people have redesigned the packaging of the popular Flake in oil.
Other varieties, such as the Kpa kpo shito, smoke flavor, chunk and solid, however remain in their original packaging. The reason for this is obvious. Counterfeiters usually go after the most popular variety.
I am turning the compost when a nephew, a student at the University of Ghana and staying with me for the week-end, screams to alert me the cell phone was ringing. I tell him to answer it.
Ten minutes later he tells me that the call had come from someone called Kodwo Twimasie. This particular nephew, born and bred in England, is sent here to get a feel of his roots, and is attending the university for eighteen months.
Eager to meet everyone who is family, he is full of questions when a rare visitor calls or someone telephones. He wants to know whether Mr. Twimasie is one of the family members he still hasn’t met, and when I tell him that Twimasie is the Chief Executive Officer of Parry & Company, his eyes suddenly begin to dance.
When he throws an arm round my shoulder and asks if he could ask a favour of me, I put on my brakes, for although he carries the name as I do, Kwesi Dzima, he and I are as different from each other as night and day. Unless I put my foot down he will live a whole day on tuna fish sandwiches. Is he going to ask me to use my friendship with the CEO to get him tins of tuna fish at discount prices?
As it turned out, I had been unnecessarily suspicious. Something had been agitating his mind since he arrived in Ghana and took to Star-Kist tuna; why does a first class outfit like Star Kist sometimes put out products that are “fuo?”(This Twi word meaning execrable is one that appears often in his language).
I cork my eyes at him, surprised that he would ask this of me. My friendship with Twimasie is one I value, I wasn’t going to jeopardize it with such a delicate question, but Kwesi Dzima junior isn’t going to drop it.
Picking up the telephone, I ask Twimasie, using diplomatic tact, whether Parry & Company, exclusive brokers of Star Kist tuna, occasionally receives complaints from customers who suspect that bad fish had got mixed in with the good? It turns out they had evidence that imitators were cashing in on the Company’s success.
Back in Accra, my nephew goes to Parry & Co’s office with two tins of the (fake tuna – the one with the familiar blue & white paper label) low quality tuna he bought on the cheap.
Bingo, the packaging proves they are imitations. I am jolted when Twimasie calls to confide that twenty to thirty percent of his company’s tuna profits are being eaten into by imitation products. In a lay man’s language that means between 48 to 60,000 tins of original Star Kist tuna lost to the imitation market.
Faking in our food supplies? I get tremulous. It is one thing reading and hearing about imitation in our textile industry but food? I get very concerned, for I have been one columnist who has been pummeling Ghanaian manufacturers in the last few years for flooding the market with imitation products.
Have I been unfair? Time to work to separate the wheat from the chaff. Where do I begin? Twimasie suggests that first I familiarize myself with the company by visiting its website? My down-grading of Ghanaian businesses is to the point where it has never crossed my mind they have such a thing as websites, and it is a delight to me to find that Parry & Co. do.
Because there are four groups of people, women among them, whose success I celebrate, it warmed my heart to find that whereas Parry & Co. has been trading and marketing Star Kist for some seventeen years, the company itself was founded forty-four years ago by Twimasie’s mother, Mrs. Dorothy Twimasie.
A woman reaching that level of success in a male-dominated society like ours? It couldn’t have been easy for her. Few men wish you luck.
When they are not trying to put obstacles in a woman’s way to success, they want a piece of her; anything to bring her down.
To think that counterfeiters are busy chipping away at the hard work, to say nothing of the seed money she sank into the Star Kist line of Parry and Co. is staggering.
How do these counterfeiters manage to break into the system and flood the market with the fake products that play trickery on consumers who go from the unsuspecting to those looking out for things on the cheap?
Well, cheap, unknown brands of tuna find their way into Nigeria and Ghana, under-valued for tax purposes. The counterfeiters buy them, remove the original labels for faked substitutes and pass them off as the genuine product to the consumer. We buy them, not knowing any better. They are so adept they have managed to infiltrate the markets in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and now Ghana.
I decided to do this story because what is happening is frightful.
There can be no wrangling about this; if there is one thing that any government department charged with protecting native industries, particularly product safety, can’t afford to be careless or unconcerned about, it is in supplies of things we ingest - food, drugs and drinks.
The threat that this tinkering of anything that goes into our bodies poses looms so large that it would be highly irresponsible of any customs or security agent to look the other way while this is going on.
The Food & Drugs Board (FDB) has been helpful in the fight – having had some successful joint patrols/market raids along with the police in the cities.
The CEPS have also seized a number of fake SKT products at the State warehouse at Aflao. However, the traders often out-smart them by using unauthorized routes into the country.
The prosecution of those caught selling fake products (about thirty in all) however has been a huge challenge for the police. Not one case has so far made it to court for trial - about six months after the arrests.
Scrap off the security and the health concerns and we still have the big question of why we should use our money to support unscrupulous people who want to get fat off the rest of us? I repeat; on this issue there cannot be any wrangling. The debate, if any, should be on national safety, and we can learn a thing or two from what happened in America last year.
There had been rumblings, going years back that counterfeit prescription drugs manufactured in foreign countries, were entering the market en masse.
The internet, plus the stupendous cost of prescription drugs made it all too easy for the counterfeiters to sell their products. On the internet you do not need a prescription to buy a drug. No questions are asked and drugs can often be bought for less than a fraction of the cost at a pharmacy.
For instance, it costs me $90.00 to buy a point 0.15 bottle of Xalatan to treat my glaucoma if I bought it at a pharmacy.
The same drug, when purchased from the internet, costs me $25. What accounts for the disparity? In nine out of ten cases the one advertised on the internet is a fake.
Last year, following tips that the Pfitzer Company, one of the giants in drug manufacturing received, it brought in the FBI.
The trail led the FBI and company officials to Peru, South America. What they found, when they entered the factory where imitations of their products were being made, stunned them; tons and tons of all their leading drugs were there. More shocking was the packaging, so well done that one needed a professional eye to be able to tell a genuine product from a fake.
When those drugs were placed under a laboratory analysis, all were found to be mixtures of sugar and maple syrup. Imagine the effect this was having on diabetic patients who were using them, believing it was the real McCoy. Ghanaians are not exactly strangers to this.
Sometime in the Seventies, according to press reports, aspirins manufactured by a pharmaceutical company owned by a Syrian or Lebanese man, turned out to contain water and chalk. This is an unforgivable crime.
Troubled by what they discovered in Peru, the leading American drug companies, together with the FBI, widened their search when it came up that eleven patients taking the drug Helprin for the treatment of a blood disorder had died suspiciously.
The net took them to India, where investigations soon revealed that one of the ingredients in the drug, ordered either from India or china, where supervision over drugs is lax, was toxic.
Is this what we want for our country? Certainly not.
To protect their health, and save them from throwing away money on imitation products, which was becoming a problem, the Star Kist people have redesigned the packaging of the popular Flake in oil.
Other varieties, such as the Kpa kpo shito, smoke flavor, chunk and solid, however remain in their original packaging. The reason for this is obvious. Counterfeiters usually go after the most popular variety.
I am turning the compost when a nephew, a student at the University of Ghana and staying with me for the week-end, screams to alert me the cell phone was ringing. I tell him to answer it.
Ten minutes later he tells me that the call had come from someone called Kodwo Twimasie. This particular nephew, born and bred in England, is sent here to get a feel of his roots, and is attending the university for eighteen months.
Eager to meet everyone who is family, he is full of questions when a rare visitor calls or someone telephones. He wants to know whether Mr. Twimasie is one of the family members he still hasn’t met, and when I tell him that Twimasie is the Chief Executive Officer of Parry & Company, his eyes suddenly begin to dance.
When he throws an arm round my shoulder and asks if he could ask a favour of me, I put on my brakes, for although he carries the name as I do, Kwesi Dzima, he and I are as different from each other as night and day. Unless I put my foot down he will live a whole day on tuna fish sandwiches. Is he going to ask me to use my friendship with the CEO to get him tins of tuna fish at discount prices?
As it turned out, I had been unnecessarily suspicious. Something had been agitating his mind since he arrived in Ghana and took to Star-Kist tuna; why does a first class outfit like Star Kist sometimes put out products that are “fuo?”(This Twi word meaning execrable is one that appears often in his language).
I cork my eyes at him, surprised that he would ask this of me. My friendship with Twimasie is one I value, I wasn’t going to jeopardize it with such a delicate question, but Kwesi Dzima junior isn’t going to drop it.
Picking up the telephone, I ask Twimasie, using diplomatic tact, whether Parry & Company, exclusive brokers of Star Kist tuna, occasionally receives complaints from customers who suspect that bad fish had got mixed in with the good? It turns out they had evidence that imitators were cashing in on the Company’s success.
Back in Accra, my nephew goes to Parry & Co’s office with two tins of the (fake tuna – the one with the familiar blue & white paper label) low quality tuna he bought on the cheap.
Bingo, the packaging proves they are imitations. I am jolted when Twimasie calls to confide that twenty to thirty percent of his company’s tuna profits are being eaten into by imitation products. In a lay man’s language that means between 48 to 60,000 tins of original Star Kist tuna lost to the imitation market.
Faking in our food supplies? I get tremulous. It is one thing reading and hearing about imitation in our textile industry but food? I get very concerned, for I have been one columnist who has been pummeling Ghanaian manufacturers in the last few years for flooding the market with imitation products.
Have I been unfair? Time to work to separate the wheat from the chaff. Where do I begin? Twimasie suggests that first I familiarize myself with the company by visiting its website? My down-grading of Ghanaian businesses is to the point where it has never crossed my mind they have such a thing as websites, and it is a delight to me to find that Parry & Co. do.
Because there are four groups of people, women among them, whose success I celebrate, it warmed my heart to find that whereas Parry & Co. has been trading and marketing Star Kist for some seventeen years, the company itself was founded forty-four years ago by Twimasie’s mother, Mrs. Dorothy Twimasie.
A woman reaching that level of success in a male-dominated society like ours? It couldn’t have been easy for her. Few men wish you luck.
When they are not trying to put obstacles in a woman’s way to success, they want a piece of her; anything to bring her down.
To think that counterfeiters are busy chipping away at the hard work, to say nothing of the seed money she sank into the Star Kist line of Parry and Co. is staggering.
How do these counterfeiters manage to break into the system and flood the market with the fake products that play trickery on consumers who go from the unsuspecting to those looking out for things on the cheap?
Well, cheap, unknown brands of tuna find their way into Nigeria and Ghana, under-valued for tax purposes. The counterfeiters buy them, remove the original labels for faked substitutes and pass them off as the genuine product to the consumer. We buy them, not knowing any better. They are so adept they have managed to infiltrate the markets in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and now Ghana.
I decided to do this story because what is happening is frightful.
There can be no wrangling about this; if there is one thing that any government department charged with protecting native industries, particularly product safety, can’t afford to be careless or unconcerned about, it is in supplies of things we ingest - food, drugs and drinks.
The threat that this tinkering of anything that goes into our bodies poses looms so large that it would be highly irresponsible of any customs or security agent to look the other way while this is going on.
The Food & Drugs Board (FDB) has been helpful in the fight – having had some successful joint patrols/market raids along with the police in the cities.
The CEPS have also seized a number of fake SKT products at the State warehouse at Aflao. However, the traders often out-smart them by using unauthorized routes into the country.
The prosecution of those caught selling fake products (about thirty in all) however has been a huge challenge for the police. Not one case has so far made it to court for trial - about six months after the arrests.
Scrap off the security and the health concerns and we still have the big question of why we should use our money to support unscrupulous people who want to get fat off the rest of us? I repeat; on this issue there cannot be any wrangling. The debate, if any, should be on national safety, and we can learn a thing or two from what happened in America last year.
There had been rumblings, going years back that counterfeit prescription drugs manufactured in foreign countries, were entering the market en masse.
The internet, plus the stupendous cost of prescription drugs made it all too easy for the counterfeiters to sell their products. On the internet you do not need a prescription to buy a drug. No questions are asked and drugs can often be bought for less than a fraction of the cost at a pharmacy.
For instance, it costs me $90.00 to buy a point 0.15 bottle of Xalatan to treat my glaucoma if I bought it at a pharmacy.
The same drug, when purchased from the internet, costs me $25. What accounts for the disparity? In nine out of ten cases the one advertised on the internet is a fake.
Last year, following tips that the Pfitzer Company, one of the giants in drug manufacturing received, it brought in the FBI.
The trail led the FBI and company officials to Peru, South America. What they found, when they entered the factory where imitations of their products were being made, stunned them; tons and tons of all their leading drugs were there. More shocking was the packaging, so well done that one needed a professional eye to be able to tell a genuine product from a fake.
When those drugs were placed under a laboratory analysis, all were found to be mixtures of sugar and maple syrup. Imagine the effect this was having on diabetic patients who were using them, believing it was the real McCoy. Ghanaians are not exactly strangers to this.
Sometime in the Seventies, according to press reports, aspirins manufactured by a pharmaceutical company owned by a Syrian or Lebanese man, turned out to contain water and chalk. This is an unforgivable crime.
Troubled by what they discovered in Peru, the leading American drug companies, together with the FBI, widened their search when it came up that eleven patients taking the drug Helprin for the treatment of a blood disorder had died suspiciously.
The net took them to India, where investigations soon revealed that one of the ingredients in the drug, ordered either from India or china, where supervision over drugs is lax, was toxic.
Is this what we want for our country? Certainly not.
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