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SSAFE Advocates for Future-Proofing Food System Through Holistic, Risk-Based Food Safety Approach
In celebration of World Food Safety Day, which took place on June 7, SSAFE has published a knowledge paper, “The Future of Food Safety,” offering a pragmatic, integrated, risk-based future approach to food safety to support global trade, food security, and sustainability.
The paper was developed in partnership with Markus Lipp, Ph.D., Senior Food Safety Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and was written by Steve Wearne, former Chair of the Codex Alimentarius Commission.
The paper suggests that the binary, compliance-based approach to food safety polarizes food as “safe” or “unsafe,” and advocates instead for a more holistic framework. It recommends that, through cross-sector collaboration, attention should be given to the broader implications of the consumption of foods that are noncompliant with food safety standards, where the highly conservative safety margins inherent in normative risk assessment processes are eroded, but where there are also important gains in terms of food security and the sustainability of food systems.
By integrating considerations across food safety, security, and sustainability when setting regulatory policy and implementing specific risk management measures, significant gains can be made to future-proof the global food system, the paper posits.
The paper can be downloaded here.
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