The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (EC’s DG SANTE) recently published a report on the effectiveness of EU Member States’ strategic approaches for fighting food fraud, which informed a guidance document published by EC Joint Research Center (JRC) that supports Member State efforts in this area.
The DG SANTE report summarizes the findings of a survey and pilot studies carried out between 2020 and 2022, with the aim of collecting information on the suitability and effective implementation of national arrangements to fight fraud along the agrifood chain in accordance with EU Regulation 2017/625 Article 9(2). The regulation requires Member States to organize proactive, risk-based controls to identify and combat fraudulent and deceptive practices along the agrifood chain, going beyond traditional official controls that exist only to verify compliance with food and feed safety law.