The Shifting Definition of Food Security

After all, effective, uniform, and transferrable testing methodologies lie at the crux of a global solution for enhancing food safety. It also has a critical role in ensuring standards harmonization, enforcing accountability, and demonstrating compliance. And recent innovations in testing technology have greatly increased the simplicity, sensitivity, reproducibility, and versatility of testing systems, which means they are well-equipped to meet rising regulatory demands.

Tests must also be easy to deploy so that they can be incorporated into the process of food production, trade, and commodities exchanges without being overly burdensome. This is an area in which Waters Corp. has been particularly successful. One recently developed testing method requires just two minutes to identify melamine in baby formula—which was the culprit in China’s infamous milk scandal that killed six infants and hospitalized more than 50,000 others.

Governments’ role in the new Green Revolution is equally if not more important. Government agencies are responsible for simultaneously seeking to protect citizens and market access by ensuring that inbound and outbound foods are compliant in equal measure. The global integration of the food supply chain forces us to rely on health and food safety agencies in all parts of the world to be good stewards of the public’s trust. Strong regional leadership is critical to fostering compliance and enforcing accountability. And to supplement government regulation, non-governmental organizations can promote food safety compliance while being active participants in facilitating knowledge transfer to emerging economies.

The Power of Partnership

If each stakeholder group does their part individually, we will make great strides in building a secure and sustainable food system. But real progress requires public-private partnerships that bring these groups together around shared goals. While partnerships on the scale necessary to affect our global food system are inherently difficult to establish and manage, there are real-world examples that such ambitious collaborative efforts can be successful.

The Global Food Safety Partnership (GFSP) is among the most promising efforts in this area. Growing out of a joint initiative by the World Bank and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Food Safety Cooperation Forum, the GFSP, aims to leverage and coordinate the collective activities of governments, inter-governmental bodies—including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization—as well as industry and NGOs. Private companies, such as Nestle and Waters, provide valuable technical insight.

In its first four years, the GFSP has already supported a number of capacity building activities in a range of countries, including most recently a comprehensive and scalable “train the trainer” program in China. The initiative has created new experts in Chinese governmental agencies and supported them as they begin to roll out the training programs to their respective organizations. Future initiatives include a needs assessment being conducted in Zambia and an aquaculture practices training program in Malaysia. The partnership is also developing a long-term strategy to collectively support and sustain investment in food safety systems.

The International Food Safety Training Laboratory (IFSTL), which operates out of the U.S. FDA supported Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the University of Maryland, is dedicated to training in the area of chemical and microbial food safety. In partnership with GFSP, the goal of the IFSTL is to deliver training that is, ultimately, locally based (more directly situated at the point of need), has a global platform for delivery, harmonized to standards, and delivered by worldwide experts. To this end, the GFSP recently launched a pilot training program in China to expand the footprint of locally based training. This pilot involved a train the trainer program for Chinese government scientists at IFSTL in Maryland, followed by IFSTL instructors supporting these fledgling trainers as they in turn delivered the training in China to scientists from their organizations. The program funding came from both public (USDA) and private (Waters, Nestle, Mars Inc.) sources, with additional funding from GFSP directly. The efficacy of the training and its implementation will be evaluated through Food Analysis Performance Assessment Scheme proficiency testing samples donated by the Food & Environment Research Agency in the U.K., an IFSTL network affiliate.