Purdue Receives $10 Million to Continue Work to Strengthen Global Food Safety
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A Purdue University professor has been awarded $10 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to extend the work of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety (FSIL) for another five years.
Haley Oliver, Ph.D., Professor of Food Science in Purdue’s College of Agriculture and Director of FSIL, has led the lab since 2019, which has been involved in more than a dozen food safety research projects around the globe. Such projects include strengthening food safety practices in the fish supply chain in Bangladesh, controlling pathogen contamination in the Cambodian produce industry, improving food safety policies for the Kenyan poultry industry, increasing food safety capacities in the Senegal dairy sector, incentivizing market-led produce safety in Nepal, and educating Nigerian communities about household food safety. The past five years of work at FSIL has focused on identifying key pathogens and assessing food safety beliefs and behaviors in the target countries.
With renewed funding from USAID, the lab’s next five years of work will include research to effect food safety behavioral changes and policy development in Cambodia, Nepal, and Kenya—three countries that are positioned to make progress in the area of food safety, but have room for improvement in food safety awareness and training, surveillance, and enforcement. Purdue researchers have recently been commissioned to conduct food safety surveys in Cambodia, Nepal, and Kenya to measure consumer perspectives and attitudes toward food safety.
Additional projects will be funded through an upcoming request for applications, with three areas of focus: increasing consumer awareness of and demand for safer food, empowering governments to generate and use food safety data, and encouraging safe food production practices among industry.
FSIL’s overall goal is to support data-driven policies and practices to prevent foodborne illnesses around the world.
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