FOOD SAFETY
Strategic approaches to addressing food safety Words by Deon Mahoney
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t has long been recognised that illness associated with contaminated food is a widespread health problem across the world and a significant cause of reduced economic productivity. It also significantly impacts consumer confidence in the food supply. Regrettably, national plans and strategies seeking to manage food safety have a tendency to be ad hoc, prepared largely in response to an emergent crisis or a critical incident impacting public health. In 2000, the Fifty-third World Health Assembly (WHA) formally acknowledged that foodborne illnesses associated with microbial pathogens, biotoxins, and chemical contaminants in food represented a serious threat to the health of millions of people. The WHA resolution on food safety (WHA53.15) was the first in
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the 50-year history of the World Health Organisation (WHO), and it urged member states to integrate food safety as one of their essential public health and nutrition functions, and to deliver sufficient resources to establish and strengthen their food safety programs. The Assembly also directed the WHO to give greater emphasis to food safety, and to work towards integrating food safety as one of WHO’s essential public health functions. The goal being the development of sustainable, integrated food-safety systems for the reduction of health risk along the entire food chain, from the primary producer to the consumer WHO subsequently launched the WHO Global Strategy for Food Safety: Safer food for better health in 20021 with the goal of reducing the health and social
burden of foodborne illness. Under the strategy, the prevention of foodborne disease and the response to food safety challenges required holistic, risk-based and timely national food safety policies and strategies. Unfortunately the strategy was not adequately underpinned by a comprehensive global action plan focussed on supporting developing economies to build and strengthen their systems.
Global strategy 2022-2030 Twenty years later, in 2020, the Seventy-third WHA again visited food safety and agreed to a resolution titled Strengthening efforts on food safety. The resolution recognised the uncompleted challenge of managing food safety and requested WHO to update the WHO Global Strategy for Food Safety. This included a call to address
