In Focus Sunday June 4th, 2006 . . .SABC2 18:30

Meat Safety

TV-footage of dirty, unhygienic meat processing machines in Gauteng horrified viewers when it was broadcast on Focus last month.  Rotten meat, maggots, and worm eggs were found when a technician opened up machines for the Focus camera. 

              Irregular cleaning clogs up machines such as this one

Producer Hanti Schrader found the same problems when she investigated butcheries and chain stores’ meat departments in the Western Cape, the Freestate and Mpumalanga.  

Bungling butchers claim they didn’t know they had to dismantle machines for cleaning 

Butchers plead ignorance and environmental health practitioners say the law doesn’t stipulate exactly how butchery machinery should be inspected.  But, what are the facts and what about consumers’ rights? Tune in to Focus Sunday July 4^th on SABC-2 at 18:30 for the answers.

And

Sweet Success: 

From the small town of Dysselsdorp near Oudtshoorn in the Western Cape comes the story of a small empowernment project that has grown in leaps and bounds.  Six years ago Focus reported on plans to extract liqourice from an intruder shrub growing wild on the banks of the Olifantsriver. The CSIR helped to establish an extraction plant unique to the southern hemisphere.  

Initially it provided work for only a handful of residents, but today it boasts a work force of more than 100 people in peak season.

Plans are afoot for even bigger expansion to the benefit of a community in which unemployment stands at nearly 60-percent.  Producer Keith Sayster took a closer look at the sweet success of liqourice in Dysselsdorp.