Muslim community cracking down on fake Halal foods

TORONTO – Canada’s growing Halal food industry has made it an attractive target for fraud – something that leaders in Canada’s Muslim community hope to end.

"Halal is really important to uphold a Muslim’s spirituality, the acceptance of our worship in the eyes of God is dependent on it, that we’re only consuming Halal," says Omar Subedar, a Toronto-area imam who serves as the secretary general and official spokesperson of the Halal Monitoring Authority.

Subedar says that the inability of meat producers and abattoirs to meet the rising demand for Halal meat, coupled with a lack of oversight opened the door for exploitation.

"As the Muslim community grows here in Canada, and specifically the GTA, you’re going to see a lot of people now demanding  Halal products," says Subedar.

Subedar says he was first tipped off to the scams years ago by sources inside the meat producing itself.

At first he was skeptical of the information, thinking it was merely an attempt discredit the competition while promoting their own product.

After some initial digging, Subedar and his peers organized a task force that carried out several investigations over a four-month period in 2004.

In one particular investigation, involved a quail abattoir that produced Halal meat exclusively for a single client.

Knowing this, a distributor began sticking his own "Halal" labels on non-Halal meat leaving the abattoir.

The next step for Subedar and his fellow imams is to create an official, national governing body to regulate the certification of Halal products.