As welcome as the UN Food Safety System has been, one metric was glaringly left on the sidelines—food safety, the ultimate measure of the success of an equitable, international (and national) food system.
Tomorrow is Awareness of Food Loss and Waste Day. GFSF focuses on cost-effective technologies, like Chowberry app for Nigerian consumers in supermarkets. Every day for GFSF is connecting the dots between food loss and food security.
We welcome the upcoming initiative -Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate- to be announced at the UN Food Systems Summit on Thursday. It spotlights the need for global ag innovation and new technology R&D for climate change mitigation & adaptation—farming for our future!
We commend APEC for hosting an outstanding workshop on WGS (whole genome sequencing). Excellent presentations and messaging on trade and regulatory capacity building. The science is there; the scientists are, too. The big hurdle remains international private/public sector collaboration.
Have a look at Bill Marler’s tweet/ Stop Food Borne Illness recommendations to modernize US food recall system.
September is National Food Safety Education Month. 48 million cases of foodborne illness are reported annually – that’s about 1 in 6 Americans each year. CDC & FDA postings offer advice for consumers, but without full supply chain compliance, home kitchens are a weak defense.
There’s a wave for food safety tracing and digitalization. And GFSF is on it but we’re not surfers. We’re doers. New tech helps produce food safely but data management software helps deliver it in supply chains. One without the other risks leading to a tsunami, not global food safety.
The US CDC/ FDA/ and USDA’s FSIS (food safety & inspection) list these multi-state investigations: Listeria (3); Salmonella (20) and E.Coli (3). Scale that to global supply chains and the threat is exponential. Surveillance is a warning but prevention is a cure.
The UN Pre-Summit for Food Systems in Rome targeted transformational change with global policies/actions. But nationalist bias and unabated climate adversity risk making sustainability unsustainable.