“There is no food security without food safety,” - FAO Director-General
The First International Food Safety Conference, in Addis Ababa, organized by the African Union (AU), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) has emphasized the need for greater international cooperation is needed to prevent unsafe food from causing ill health and hampering progress towards sustainable development.
Food contaminated with bacteria, viruses, parasites, toxins or chemicals causes more than 600 million people to fall ill and 420 000 to die worldwide every year. Illness linked to unsafe food overloads healthcare systems and damages economies, trade and tourism. The impact of unsafe food costs low- and middle-income economies around $95 billion in lost productivity each year, world leaders said.
"There is no food security without food safety. This conference is a great opportunity for the international community to strengthen political commitments and engage in key actions. Safeguarding our food is a shared responsibility. We must all play our part. We must work together to scale up food safety in national and international political agendas", said FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva.
Technological advances, digitalization, novel foods and processing methods provide a wealth of opportunities to simultaneously enhance food safety and improve nutrition, livelihoods and trade. At the same time, climate change and the globalization of food production, coupled with a growing global population and increasing urbanization, pose new challenges to food safety. Food systems are becoming even more complex and interlinked, blurring lines of regulatory responsibility. Solutions to these potential problems require intersectoral and concerted international action.
The aim of the conference is to identify key actions that will ensure the availability of, and access to, safe food now and in the future. This will require a strengthened commitment at the highest political level to scale up food safety in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
A central theme of the conference is that food safety systems need to keep pace with the way food is produced and consumed. This requires sustained investment and coordinated, multi-sectoral approaches for regulatory legislation, suitable laboratory capacities, and adequate disease surveillance and food monitoring programmes, all of which need to be supported by information technologies, shared information, training and education.
Around 130 countries are participating in the two-day conference, including ministers of agriculture, health, and trade. Leading scientific experts, partner agencies and representatives of consumers, food producers, civil society organizations and the private sector are also taking part.
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