In Pakistan, it has mutated into something else: harassment disguised as governance. Walk into a shop or bakery and you will find inspectors lecturing owners not about hygiene or adulteration but about absurd technicalities. A bakery is asked to stamp an expiry date on a cake baked that very morning. A grocer is fined because rice or pulses lack expiry labels, even though grains have been stored and consumed for centuries without such markings.
This is not food safety. It is theatre. The Punjab Food Authority (PFA) and its provincial counterparts regularly issue press releases boasting of “record raids.” In August this year, PFA sealed a cake production unit and an international beverage factory as part of a sweep across 3,350 outlets. The numbers looked impressive: 11 seals, 13 cases, Rs5.6 million in fines. But do such headline raids translate into safer food?
The answer lies in what is targeted. There are cases where enforcement has been meaningful. In Lahore last year, authorities seized 2,500 kilograms of expired chicken meat destined for shawarma stalls. In other instances, diseased meat and counterfeit oils have been pulled from markets. These actions protect lives and deserve support.
But when inspectors obsess over expiry stamps on fresh cakes or demand labels on loose pulses, the focus shifts from genuine risks to trivial optics. Pakistan’s own Punjab Pure Food Regulations (2018) focus expiry rules on pre-packaged items aligned with global practice. Fresh food is meant to be regulated through hygiene checks, cold storage requirements and handling standards, not by rubber-stamped labels.
The same distortion plagues price regulation. Provincial Administrations boast of anti-profiteering drives, particularly during Ramazan. In March this year, Lahore officials detained 335 retailers in a single month for price violations. In April, another crackdown announced action against nearly 1,000 shopkeepers in 24 hours. The problem is not enforcement per se it is that the official price lists are often based on the cheapest wholesale quality, not the higher-grade goods many retailers sell.
The result is predictable. Either quality vanishes from shelves or honest shopkeepers are criminalized for refusing to sell premium basmati rice at the same rate as broken grain. Last year, retailers in Punjab publicly threatened a strike, arguing that official rates forced them to sell below their own wholesale costs. That is not price control. It is economic self-sabotage.
The tragedy is that Pakistan does have genuine regulatory challenges: adulteration, counterfeit expiry stamps and smuggling of unsafe goods. In September, officials in KP reported catching warehouse owners using machinery to re-stamp expired items with fake new dates, a textbook case of fraud that directly endangers consumers. A parallel confusion exists in halal certification. The Pakistan Halal Authority only began operating with formal rules in late 2021, years after its law was passed. Provincial “Halal Food Authorities” run their own drives, sometimes rightly seizing substandard meat and counterfeit honey, sometimes blurring lines with food-safety raids. For the public, it all collapses into one thing: harassment without clarity.
This is why regulation in Pakistan generates anger instead of trust. Inspectors measure their success in fines, seals and viral raid videos. But fines are not outcomes. Seals are not outcomes. Public health indicators like microbial pass rates, reduced incidence of adulteration, higher compliance in meat handling are outcomes.
If Pakistan is serious about fixing this cycle, the reforms are obvious: – Risk-based inspections: Prioritize high-risk categories, meat, dairy, edible oils. – Differentiate fresh from packaged: Enforce expiry and labelling rules only on pre-packaged products; use hygiene and storage checks for fresh items. – Transparent, graded price lists: Reflect quality differentials and update frequently with input-cost data. – Criminal focus on fraud: Target counterfeit expiry stamping and industrial adulteration with real penalties. – Education-first compliance: Reserve heavy fines for repeat or high-risk violations; give smaller businesses guidance before punishment.
None of this requires new laws. It requires discipline. Pakistan’s institutes prefer raids over reform because raids create headlines. But a system that harasses bakeries over expiry stamps while counterfeiters re-stamp expired stock is not a system that protects the public. It is a system that rewards shortcuts, punishes quality and erodes trust. Until we replace theatrical enforcement with genuine facilitation, our regulators will remain obstacles, not protectors. And until that shift happens, the biggest threat to business in Pakistan will not be inflation, electricity or competition. It will be the institute itself.
— The writer occasionally contributes to the national press.
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