It’s not just Crab Cirle

The recent video exposing poor hygiene at Kingston's Crab Circle highlights the need for stricter regulation and oversight of street food vendors across Jamaica. While street food is popular, it poses health risks if not properly regulated. Food handlers should have permits issued by public-health bodies, venues must be licensed and inspected regularly, and government regulations should be enforced. Additionally, public spaces must be kept clean to prevent the spread of food-borne diseases. This issue is not limited to Crab Circle but extends to various locations across Jamaica, and addressing it is crucial to avoid a potential public-health crisis.

Head off public health crisis

Jamaica Gleaner

9 Oct 2023

AS WE observed on Saturday, the recent video of evidence of the collapse of personal hygiene at Kingston’s popular Crab Circle – and the grave threat to public health therefrom – calls for robust policing of the sale of street food across the island.

However, any initiative to enforce higher standards of personal hygiene among food handlers, which is urgent, cannot be divorced from the obligation of government, national and municipal, to ensure cleanliness and order in public spaces. That is a matter to which this newspaper has frequently drawn attention, with, at best, muted responses from those with whom the responsibility lies. Except, as in Crab Circle fiasco, when public health authorities shut down the facility, and Kingston’s mayor, Delroy Lewis, waxed defensively about what his administration has supposedly done to improve the area – install a 500-gallon water tank and got the rum company J. Wray and Nephew to upgrade stalls. He missed the larger point.

Buying cooked food on the streets is common across the world. Often, it is a way for people to obtain relatively cheap meals, and, as we said on Saturday, for visitors to enjoy other people’s cuisine in authentic fashion. Indeed, the food of Crab Circle, spicy boiled land crabs and soups, were once featured on Andrew Zimmern’s global television show – Bizarre Foods. Mr Zimmern described the flavours of food as funky and earthy.

COMPROMISED HYGIENE

People who consume street food know that there are dangers of compromised hygiene, but rely on two factors to limit those risks: an honour system of regulation among food handlers; and robust oversight by the government/public health authorities of rules and regulations.

It was the failure of the first that was captured on that viral video – of a woman cleaning herself, having apparently defecated in her stall. That woman, as well as other food sellers at Crab Circle, and anywhere people work in the preparation of food across the island, should have food handler’s permits, issued by parish public health bodies.

Those permits are supposed to be contingent on applicants passing a prescribed test. Similarly, venues where food is prepared and sold are supposed to be licensed by the municipal authorities and periodically inspected by public health officials, to limit the prospect of the spread of food-borne diseases.

But the government’s obligation to protect public health is not limited to merely having rules and regulations. They must be robustly enforced – which, in Jamaica, they are not. And public spaces must be clean. The latter is hit and miss in Jamaica, rather than the norm.

Many people, therefore, would not be surprised at the crass abandonment in personal hygiene at Crab Circle, at the southwestern edge of National Heroes Circle, when the entire perimeter of the adjacent park where there are shrines to Jamaica’s national heroes, is in squalor. Mounds of uncollected garbage are all round.

It was once clean for a while – in 2015, during a visit of the then US president, Barack Obama. He was to visit the park. In preparation, the original derelict crab shacks were demolished, with plans for new, better structures. In the aftermath of Mr Obama’s visit that April, The Gleaner said: “So, with Barack Obama having left Jamaica, the crab vendors are back at the roadside across from National Heroes Park, and soon, the cynics expect, will the ramshackle accoutrements – notwithstanding the promise by the local government authorities of new, sanitary stalls. They believe, too, that recently planted flowers at the Harbour View roundabout, en route to Kingston from the Norman Manley International Airport, will soon wilt and die for want of care; that whitewashed and clipped verges, which the US president never saw, will quickly turn grubby; that roads repaved, or patched for presidential motorcades will again be potholed and strewn with garbage, with no one seeming either to notice or care.” We might have also mentioned that the potentially disease-spreading vermin will be afforded the kind of environment in which they prefer to breed.

DETERIORATED

Largely, what was expected happened. The new stalls relatively recently built at Crab Circle have already deteriorated. And the world has video evidence of what happened last week.

But this problem of urban squalor and its threat to public health is not only at Heroes Circle.

In November 2018, Calvin Allen, the then head of the constabulary’s at the time newly formed Public Safety and Traffic Enforcement Branch, spearheaded a washdown of Half-Way Tree Square, a busy section of the capital where the sale of street food is also popular.

“The area has been heavily stenched with human waste, mostly urine, which has resulted in a health hazard in the areas of Half-Way Tree,” Mr Allen complained at the time. Half-Way Tree is again rank-smelling and unkempt.

Downtown Kingston, where there are agricultural food markets and hundreds of vendors line wares on sidewalks or at the sides of roads, malodorous effluent from busted sewage systems often flows nearby, including inside markets. These issues are mirrored at the Papine Market at the other side of the city, and in cities and towns across Jamaica.

The big surprise, perhaps, is that Jamaica has thus far been spared a major public health crisis. The authorities should act now to prevent it happening.

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