World Spice meet opens today

The seventh World Spice Congress is being held here from Thursday with a major focus on manifold uses of spices such as medicinal and natural colouring to promote exports and consumption, besides encouraging spicy cuisine the world over.

Catering to the niche market of organic spices, reducing pesticide usage and maintaining uniform international quality standards are some of the issues to be deliberated upon at the three-day event.

Around 350 delegates from over 31 countries are expected to participate in the congress being organised jointly by the Spices Board and the All India Spices Exporters Forum.

CJ Jose, the chairman of the Spices Board, and RK Menon, the chairman of the exporters forum, attached special significance to the international meet which, they said, would provide impetus to the efforts to achieve 12 per cent growth in the Indian spices exports.

Apart from the spice-importing countries like US, UK, Australia, Austria, representatives from the spice-exporting countries like Madagascar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand are participating in the meet. There will be sessions on crops and markets, food safety initiative and on the main theme of congress, 'Flavours and Beyond'. Major spices like pepper, chillies, vanilla and organic spices will be dealt with in greater detail.

Jose said stringent quality parameters with regular sampling had been adopted to detect the presence of carcinogenic 'Sudan Red-1' dye in chillies, since October 2003 after two stray instances of contamination had been reported.

"The Spices Board would soon be equipping its testing laboratory with ultra-modern equipment to be brought from the west to match the test results with those of the laboratories in the western countries," Jose added.