The High Court yesterday said that the government should not force anyone to consume the wheat imported from Brazil, and take it back if anyone wants to return though the food department report says it is safe for human consumption.
The bench of Justice Quazi Reza-Ul Hoque and Justice Abu Taher Md Saifur Rahman observed there is no report before the court that the wheat, which has already been distributed, caused illness or harm to anybody’s health.
“Based on the food department’s report, the court said that the wheat is perhaps okay and suitable for human consumption,” Deputy Attorney General Tapash Kimar Biswas said.
However, the court also mentioned about some of the local laboratories that claimed that they had found insects in the wheat, he said.
According to government officials, who have been insisting that the wheat is safe for consumption, they have supplied wheat to the forces that receive government rations and also to various dealers and mills, test relief and Food-for-Work programme.
According to Food Ministry, out of 205,128 tonnes of the Brazilian wheat, 174,926 tonnes were distributed over the last four months.
A debate emerged following media reports that the imported wheat was not safe for human consumption. Many demanded the resignation of Food Minister Kamrul Islam for insisting that the wheat was fine.
Along with the copies of the media reports, a lawyer named Pavel Mian filed a writ petition on June 29 with the High Court seeking probe on the matter.
He also demanded the wheat be tested by the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institute (BSTI) and Bangladesh Agriculture Research Institute and also pleaded for a probe by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) on the import process.
The next day the court ordered the government to clarify in 72 hours whether the wheat was suitable for human consumption or not.
Later the Directorate General of Food Department filed a report and cited test results of the Agriculture Research Institute, the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (BCSIR) and Dhaka University laboratories saying the wheat was fine.
It also said that the ministry ran a test in the food department’s laboratory on 57 samples collected from warehouses all over the country and found that the wheat as “okay.”
The wheat samples collected from Magura, Patuakhali, Sherpur, Bogra, Sirajganj and Joypurhat districts were partly rotten. “There are living insects in the samples and this [the wheat] could be distributed after controlling the insects in a proper way,” the study concluded.
The BCSIR test report, dated June 28, says: “All the supplied samples contained higher amount of shrunken and broken kernels than the supplied specification.”
The 10 specific parameters against which the wheat was tested by the BCSIR were: test weight, heat damage kernels, damage kernels, presence of foreign materials, shrunken and broken kernels, contrasting classes, wheat of other classes, protein, moisture and dock age.
Citing the study reports at a briefing on Sunday, the food minister claimed that there is nothing wrong with the imported grains. On Tuesday, he told parliament that the media reports on the imported wheat were fabricated and baseless.
Earlier, the minister had said that the government had cancelled the order of wheat from Brazil due to its poor quality.
