Top Editors ... Revolution in Food Safety Management, Bali – Indonesia February 2008

Title: Revolution in Food Safety Management, Bali – Indonesia February 2008
Date: 02/02/2008
Autor: The Food World

Background
In recent years "risk-based" approaches, based on the best available scientific information, have been recognized as a means of enhancing the ability of food safety risk management to meet its primary goal of protecting public health, as well as ensuring access to an adequate food supply and facilitating trade. Such an approach implies that actions, regulations, guidelines, and standards are constructed and formulated according to specific knowledge of "risks" to life and health. The practical aspects of developing and implementing a "risk-based" standard introduce new challenges.

While governments have the overall responsibility for protecting the health of consumers and so are responsible for determining policy, setting levels of health protection, targets for food-borne hazards and other food standards and ensuring these are met, the food industry works at the operational level implementing the necessary control measures to ensure that any food produced meets the standards or targets set by the regulatory authorities. There are different approaches and tools available to regulatory authorities and industry and in recent years these have been evolving with the overall objective of enhancing food safety.

The Codex Alimentarius, a set of internationally developed and agreed standards, guidelines and related texts aimed at consumer health protection and facilitation of food- trade, is an important reference point for national regulatory authorities. The Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), an intergovernmental body established by FAO and WHO to implement the joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme, oversees all standard development work carried out by its subsidiary committees. The Codex Committee on Food Hygiene is currently developing a microbiological risk management framework, which gives particular focus to the linkage between hazard levels at various points in the food chain and the public health outcome in terms of food-borne illnesses. This includes the introduction of new metrics, namely FSO (Food Safety Objective), PO (Performance Objective), and PC (Performance Criterion), as a means to establish and communicate target limits for food-borne hazards at specific points in the food chain that will achieve a particular level of health protection. As with all Codex standards, these metrics are thus intended to contribute to the implementation of the WTO SPS-agreement, i.e. transforming Appropriate/Acceptable Levels of Protection (ALOP) determined in a country into more practical and operational metrics that can be implemented by the food business. These metrics represent a new approach to food safety management, one based on a decision by the national regulatory authorities as to the level of risk to human health that is acceptable or tolerated. The adoption of such risk-based approaches by regulatory authorities means that food safety measures are being selected and implemented by the food industry according to the need for them and their ability to achieve quantitative outcomes in terms of the reduction of food-borne disease (risk). In this way "farm to fork" management approaches are enhanced with "fork to farm" thinking a revolution in food safety management.

At industry level, the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) system, for over two decades, has been, and still is, one of the practical tools available to manage food-borne hazards and meet the requirements of regulatory authorities. Nevertheless, it continues to evolve and develop. In the field of HACCP methodology, and in particular the hazard analysis step, the incorporation of quantitative approaches where feasible are assisting in providing a framework for the practical implementation of the new metrics (the FSO/PO/PC approach) in an individual food business.. In addition, effective implementation of FSOs through FSO derived POs and PCs in a food chain requires involvement of all players in the food chain. Means for effective communication between businesses and organizations along the food chain are currently being developed and implemented in a way that enable effective and integrated hazard control wherever necessary and where cost-effective. This is often referred to as Integrated (food) Chain Management another revolution in food safety management.

However, in many countries HACCP has only been successfully introduced in large food businesses supplying export markets, with markedly less uptake in small and/or less developed businesses (SLDBs). As SLDBs provide an important source of food and contribute
To national economies, it is critical that as food safety management systems continue to evolve such businesses are not left behind. One of the challenges in moving towards risk-based approaches is to ensure that SLDB's are provided with the necessary direction and additional guidance to enable them to meet new risk-based targets.

These new approaches in food safety risk and hazard management also impact the manner in which other food safety management concepts are practiced, such as traceability, corrective measures, validation and verification, including the way microbiological criteria are used.

Dairy businesses are encouraged to adopt these new approaches to tailor-make their food management systems to the exact food safety needs according to the intended uses of the individual food lots. In some countries this may also allow food businesses to benefit from the flexibility recently granted by legislation.

Objective
The International Symposium on Revolution in Food Safety Management is organized under the auspices of the International Dairy Federation (IDF) with the technical cooperation of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and co-sponsoring of the World Health Organization (WHO) with a view to assist the dairy sector, including dairy businesses in emerging countries and SLDBs, to better understand these new approaches and consider the feasibility of their application in their sector. It will therefore focus on practical experiences, challenges, planning and feasibility to be delivered by means of presentations on the various concepts that will be further illustrated through case studies and practical examples.

Programme Overview
The symposium will include presentations by international experts that will cover the various elements in effective management of microbiological and chemical hazards relevant to the dairy chain. The program will address the following:
o Practical implications of the new food safety risk and hazard management approaches
o Contemporary principles in risk analysis
o Policies and tools applicable to the dairy sector
o Quantitative approaches for the hazard analysis step of HACCP
o Risk assessment and Predictive modeling
o The new metrics involved (FSOs, POs, PCs)
o Establishment of relevant quantitative metric in the food business
o Validation, verification and monitoring their differences and correlation
o Corrective measures and traceability systems
o Communication along the dairy chain
o Risk perception
o Cost-benefit relationship in risk management
o Respective roles of public inspection systems, third party certification and auto-control systems

The Symposium language will be English.

The target audiences are senior level decision makers in dairy (food) companies, HACCP specialists (public and private), food safety consultants and trainers, risk managers and regulators responsible for the dairy sector and young scientists working in the field of dairy (food) science.


Programme Outline
The International Symposium on Revolution in Food Safety will be held over three days focusing on practical implementation of the new approach to food safety management in five sessions.