Currently, nearly 800 tons of toys are imported to Armenia each year, sold in shops, markets and on the street. But despite legal requirements, virtually no one is checking to see if these toys are safe.

Though the law requires all toys to be certified, there are few inspections of toy shops and none of open-air or wholesale markets. And one of the state’s primary laboratories for toy testing said they’ve examined only 90 toys in 2008, according to Albert Ghazaryan, director of the National Institute of Healthcare Laboratory.

 

Last October, the government made it even easier for unregulated toys to enter the country by dropping them from the list of items that must be certified at the border, arguing that they had limited staff for inspections.

“Toys used to be on the list of imported goods subject to compulsory certification. However, the list has been cut to only syringes and cosmetics,” said Artak Shahbazyan, head of non-food products at Armenia’s Institute of Standardization, which sets the rules for certifying all goods sold in the country. “Providing quality toys, in fact, is left entirely to the importer’s conscience.”

It’s a duty that toy importers seem to be largely ignoring. A Yerevan toy shop owner, who preferred to remain anonymous, admitted he stocks his shop with toys from the Petak Wholesale Market, where he has never been shown a certificate.

“There the goods are sold first hand and no one has a certificate,” he said. “They have to provide us with the copy of that certificate but they don’t.”

Ashot Ghazaryan, head of State Agency for Quality under the Ministry of Economy, is also concerned with the quality of toys, but he says there aren’t enough inspectors to thoroughly regulate the toy market. He contended his agency has done a ‘tremendous’ job in the toy market this year: they have held surveys at five toy shops and revealed no violations. But he said they don’t have the manpower to survey the open-air markets and street sellers, the most popular shopping spots because of their cheaper prices. 

“The problem is not supervision, but the lack of capacity at our laboratories to do proper examinations, either because of lack of equipment or lack of expertise,” he said. “I think there are toys on sale that are dangerous; I can tell that for sure as a consumer.”

Nune Mkrtchyan, head of the authorization agency at the Ministry of Economy, said there are two organizations authorizing and certifying toys, the National Institute of Standardization and Mavas Company. The toy testing itself, she said, is done in five laboratories though no one specializes in toy testing. 

Testing one toy can range from 1,000-7,000 AMD ($3.30-$23), according to the National Institute of Healthcare laboratory, one of the five labs that tests toys.

But Mkrtchyan admitted labs are not required or are equipped to thoroughly test a toy to make sure it meets all safety requirements. 

“We authorize a laboratory if it undertakes the obligation to provide at least some of the numerous points of the technical requirements for toys, because if we didn’t, there wouldn’t be any lab at all [to perform the work]. There are no properly equipped labs,” said Mrs. Mkrtchyan.

 

Source from: AmericanNow.com