Food Quality Concerns in Azerbaijan

"I got terrible poisoning and went into anaphylactic shock,” Adila Aliyeva said, describing how what seemed like a bargain buy of caviar went horribly wrong.

“I spent a long time in hospital, which was difficult and expensive. But I didn’t complain to anyone – I was just glad to be alive,” she said.

Caviar, which comes from fish caught in the Caspian Sea, is widely available in Azerbaijan, but should always come with a certificate of quality, as for other foodstuffs.

Like many Azerbaijani shoppers, Aliyeva never looks for a certificate, and doubts that complaining about product quality would ever be effective.

Instead, she said, “I haven’t been able to even look at caviar ever since.”

Foodstuffs that have not been certified by the health ministry cannot be legally sold in Azerbaijan, while food producers have to be verified by the economic development ministry. But the majority of producers and vendors blithely ignore the regulations, arguing that they only increase costs.

“I sell three or four kilograms of apples for one manat [1.30 US dollars],” Anvar Mammadov, a market trader in the capital Baku, said. “If I certified these apples, who would buy them? They would cost too much…. No one does it. These are very good apples, I’d never sell bad ones.”

The health ministry insists it is on top of food safety. Imran Abdullayev, head of the ministry’s certification department, said that in July alone, 75 companies were fined for breaking rules covering the production, transport and storage of foodstuffs.

“All food products undergo certification here. If items without certificates appear on sale, consumers should come to us and we will take the required steps,” he said.

Abdullayev noted that in the same month, July, there were 114 recorded outbreaks of food poisoning.

Eyyub Huseynov, head of the Union of Free Consumers, said surveys done by his organisation indicated that around 80 per cent of the food sold in Azerbaijan had no certification.

“This is a big and complex problem,” he said. “Producers have two options – either they are honest, produce quality food and get certified; or else they forget about it and pay bribes if they do get checked. Unfortunately, most choose the latter option.”

Huseynov said his organisation had run a successful campaign about meat quality, and turned round a situation where “there was a lot of bad-quality meat, more or less carrion, on sale in Baku a couple of years ago”.

Huseynov said the wider problem had not gone away, and was exacerbated by corrupt practices that acted as a disincentive to honesty.

“It’s very hard to prove anything in court, since documents and the courts themselves are corruptible. You can buy a [forged] quality certificate,” he said. “If you actually obey the law and certify your food, then you raise your prices.”

Natig Jafarli, co-founder of REAL, an economic research group, said food imports were regularly waved past customs by corrupt officials.

“If it was all done legally, then many items simply wouldn’t be on sale,” he added.

Jafarli said some companies had a powerful hold on certain sectors of the foodstuffs market.

“They aren’t under any constraints, they can sell products of any quality that they want. No inspector would dare challenge a big business that belongs to an official, they’d be scared to,” he said.

Jafarli said the structure of the market was tilted against the independent producers, whose prices were more liable to be affected by certification costs.

“All shops buy first from the monopolies, and only then from local producers,” he explained.

For the average Azerbaijani, he added, there was an easier way to ensure they were buying good food.

“At the market, people buy things from people they know. That’s how they solve the quality issue for themselves,” he said.

Maharram Zeynalov is a freelance journalist in Azerbaijan.