The safety of food must come first in a sustainable system.
The current global and economic crises, along with sustainability issues affecting food systems, are prompting us all to consider what it takes to prepare a nutritious dinner for our loved ones. This is a global crisis: costs are rising and certain necessities are getting harder to find everywhere. It is unlikely that these pressures will lessen very soon.
It is now even more critical than before to step up efforts to create a sustainable food system that benefits all people. However, being sustainable also includes ensuring that food is safe to consume and that everyone has access to it.
To begin with, if something isn’t fit for human consumption, it shouldn’t be considered food. Each year, an estimated 600 million people worldwide—nearly one in ten—fall ill after consuming tainted food, and the epidemic has raised more worries about food safety.
Safe food is also sustainable food.
In order to ensure that food safety is everyone’s concern, cooperation and continuous effort are of course essential. World Food Safety Day was just held, and it was a significant occasion to raise awareness and engagement with food safety.
The international food sector takes seriously its obligation to ensure food safety. Businesses are making strategic choices that support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN and integrate them into the food safety system. For instance, we know that achieving SDGs 1 (no poverty) and 2 (zero hunger) will require safer food in order to ensure food security and end poverty. We need to keep building our capacities by having food industry owners everywhere control the safety of the food system.
SDG 12 addresses chemical management and food waste directly. Maintaining food safety while cutting down on food waste can be difficult, and durability labelling and shelf-life extension require careful thought. Along with maintaining control over the pollutants (closed loop, non-food grade, labels, inks, etc.) that frequently result from plastic recycling, food safety must also be upheld.
Good water and sanitation are addressed in SDG 6. The development of food systems’ capacities will depend on increased efforts to develop education on good water stewardship and management, new practices for the reuse of water in accordance with the future CODEX guidelines, and sustainability, inclusivity, and growth of food systems. Maintaining food safety while increasing water re-use is a major challenge.
Cooperation and communication
The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) Coalition of Action is behind the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI). Together with a broader food safety community, we bring together 37 manufacturers and retailers from the CGF membership to manage commercial food safety standards and contribute to universal access to safe food.
To help guarantee that everyone has access to safe food, we are working together across national boundaries. Our goal is to fortify and harmonise food safety regulations in order to feed the world’s expanding population and create markets that can provide food to customers wherever they may be in the globe. We speak for the food industry’s dedication to food safety and make investments in cooperative, open, and voluntary advancements for the good of humanity and our companies.
In addition to developing food safety capacities throughout the global food supply chain and promoting public-private collaborations, we are also harmonising and advancing advancements in food safety certification programmes and offering a platform for governments, food safety regulators, and IGOs. In an effort to improve food safety, we also seek to guarantee that best practices are shared throughout our network.
Our focus is on facilitating the vast collaboration and discussions that are so essential to achieve the aim of delivering safe food, even when many individual enterprises and groups share this goal. This entails working with food producers, distributors, farmers, academics, governments, and a host of other global stakeholders.
This is not something we can accomplish on our own. To increase consumers’ faith in the food they purchase, we must collaborate. We will proactively and collaboratively engage in continuous, structured dialogue with the GFSI community and other stakeholders to share progress, guarantee accountability, and identify venues for collaboration. In particular, we will work with CODEX to establish global guidelines, based on consensus, to address many of the challenges we must first address.
Our success depends on cooperation and involvement from all parties involved in the supply chain, thus we encourage everyone interested in joining us in our mission to continuously enhance food safety management procedures.
Everyone is entitled to food that is healthy, nourishing, and safe. We need everyone working together to safeguard consumers and increase industry trust and transparency in order to meet the challenges that lie ahead.