Imagine a world without commercial agriculture and a food commodity market. Individuals and families would have to depend on their farmed crops and livestock for survival. Governments and humanitarian organizations would have to find innovative ways to feed the vulnerable in societies hit by floods, wars, and any other disaster. Indisputably, commercial agriculture and food trade have contributed significantly to reductions in food insecurity and malnutrition around the world. Advances in science and technology have led to food engineering and processing techniques that produce high-quality, appealing foods that can be kept for longer periods.
Notwithstanding the gains that technology has brought, some food business operators are using it for unacceptable and fraudulent purposes in food production, processing, packaging, and storage. They deliberately reject the principle that “honesty is the best policy.” That act is commonly referred to as food fraud and goes back centuries, possibly as long as humans have been both eating and trading. In simple terms, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization defines it as “any suspected intentional action committed when a food business operator intentionally decides to deceive customers about the quality and/or content of the food they are purchasing in order to gain in undue advantage, usually economic, for themselves.” It can also be defined as food and its derivatives that are altered, misrepresented, mislabeled, substituted, or tampered with. Not only does it deny the consumer value for money, fraud also can have serious implications for the health of consumers and sometimes lead to death. For instance, in 2008, the ingestion of milk containing melamine sickened over 300,000 people, with more than 50,000 children hospitalized.