At a meeting today with his department heads, Ishkhan Karapetyan, the newly appointed chief of Armenia’s Food Safety Service (FSS), said that the agency will enforce all applicable laws equitably and that monitoring of violations would be beefed-up.

Karapetyan said that while numerous problems remain, certain progress had nevertheless been made, underlying that the FSS would implement a fair but strict program of food safety.

The FSS chief noted that the number one problem to be tackled was to ensure that food being sold in large and small stores alike was fresh and properly labelled.

Karapetyan said that more attention would be paid to what is going into the food produced.

“We must strive to ensure that food produced and sold in Armenia is safe and of quality,” Karapetyan told his department heads.

Karapetyan said that special attention must be paid to see that unsafe food products are not imported into the country.