International meeting considers emerging food-safety risks

Friday 9 March 2007

Food safety experts from across Europe and the rest of the world attended a workshop in London this week to consider food incident prevention and horizon scanning to identify emerging food-safety risks.

The meeting, organised by the Food Standards Agency in co-operation with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), was attended by about 140 people.

It was organised to take the first steps in shaping a strategy on food incident prevention and to provide a first practical demonstration of co-operation between EFSA and Member States under their strategy on scientific co-operation and networking.

Keynote speakers from the food industry, Government and advisory bodies, and consumer organisations shared their experiences of the causes of food incidents and outlined measures they have in place to ensure the safety and quality of the food supply.

The workshop identified a large number of suggestions for future work:

• There was broad agreement that fostering and maintaining trust between all stakeholders was vital and that devoting sufficient resource to this was very important.
• A recurring theme was how data and intelligence can be used to maximum effect to help identify emerging issues. Given the complexity of the food supply network this data is currently held in many disparate locations. Mechanisms are needed to pool this data while respecting the commercial confidentiality of some data sources.
• Effective horizon scanning needs personal contact as much as good databases of information.
• Greater collaboration at the national, European and international level is needed to avoid duplication of testing and auditing, to make the best use of finite resources.
• There should be more sharing of experience between food authorities to identify and consolidate good practice and develop more consistent risk-management approaches.
• Revisiting traceability requirements – is the current one-up one-down system sufficient? One-up one-down traceability requires each business in the food chain, for every batch of product made or sold, to keep records of suppliers and distributors. In theory, by putting all these steps together any raw material or ingredient can be traced.
• There was a need to put the earned autonomy concept into practice. This would mean that companies proving good performance including product safety, testing and good management, may incur fewer inspections allowing authorities to devote efforts on companies performing less well or that are less trusted.
• A recognition that stakeholder engagement with the media could be improved.
• The idea of creating space for uninhibited discussion of potential issues with regulators, before decisions are taken, needs to be explored.
• Involving the food industry as equal partners in research initiatives such as horizon scanning needs to be explored. Research should also include social science.

Some areas identified as subjects for possible future research include:

• forecasting consumer trends and technological developments
• examining the effectiveness of training in food handling and safety, and overcoming language and cultural barriers and the challenges posed by high staff turnover in some industries
• reducing food fraud
• developing strategies for dealing with low levels of chemicals in food.
• linking horizon scanning work to surveillance

A full report of the workshop will be produced shortly.