Global Food Safety Initiatives

Sufficient nutritious and safe food is the basic element for good health and sustained life.

- Dr. Suseelendra Desai

Food security, nutritional security and Food safety are central to human and animal health. From production through processing and consumption, food journey is prone to several health hazards risks. Food safety science is a systemic scheme that spans across multiple disciplines in a holistic way to monitor and manage the risks when the food is produced, processed, stored, and marketed. To ensure food safety globally governments have developed regulatory systems as well as guidelines and awareness programs for Food Business Operators (FBO) and consumers.

CONSEQUENCES OF UNSAFE FOOD

Unsafe food could be a source for deleterious micro- and macro-organisms and chemical substances such as Salmonella, Listeria, Escherichia, entamoeba, Giardia, and toxins. Major food-borne diseases are fever, headache, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhoea. As per WHO, every 10th person succumbs to foodborne illness and results in 4.2 lakh deaths annually and children below 5 years of age are more vulnerable. A study by Bisht et al (2021) showed that mean food-borne outbreaks in West Bengal and Karnataka were to the tune of about 30%. An estimated 100 million foodborne diseases and 1.2 lakh foodborne illness-related fatalities occur each year in India (Panwar et al., 2022). According to the World Bank report (2019), unsafe food still costs in India was $15 billion annually and India and China together contribute about 49% of total economic burden on this account. While SDG3 directly targets good health and well-being, other SDGs like 1, 2, 12 and 17 also indirectly aim to address food safety-related issues.

FOOD SAFETY IN GLOBALIZED SETTING