Page 344 - Biosystems Engineering

Food Safety Management 321

strategies. Risk assessment can be used to set FSOs and POs. Current
world and EU trade legislation highlights the need for food safety and
quality to be addressed along the entire food chain. Increased empha-
sis is placed on international collaboration to ensure safe food across
boundaries and on what is now a global food market. International
policy advocates risk assessment as a tool to evaluate risk and also to
evaluate risk management strategies. Risk assessment is regarded as
essential for managing food safety issues and can act as an extension or
validation of HACCP. Important elements yet to gain exposure within
food safety management are the establishment of FSOs on the basis of
ALOP or other public health goals, as well as the possible enforcement
of POs (or FSOs) or related PCs, standards, and control measures.
The evolution of food safety management has occurred at an
uneven pace, propelled at times by the public and by governmental
concern about food safety; it has been restrained in some cases by
limitations of technical knowledge, data, and resources. The global
harmonization of food safety regulations is necessary to ensure a safe
supply of food and to ensure fair and transparent competition among
countries in terms of trade. In light of this, risk assessments are being
used as tools to help manage risk and to help make policy decisions.
These have a significant impact on the importing and exporting of
goods to and from a country. Movement of animals and their prod-
ucts has long been recognized as having the potential to spread infec-
tion. For the facilitation of trade, international trade agreements such
as GATT and NAFTA have specified requirements for risk assess-
ment in their sanitary and SPS agreements. For animal health, SPS
measures are the most important, allowing countries to give food
safety and animal health priority over trade requirements only if a
scientific basis can be demonstrated (ICMSF 1998). Although each
country can determine the level of risk appropriate to its own condi-
tions, this must be based on defendable assessments available for
objective evaluation. These factors have resulted in increasing num-
bers of risk assessments being completed for increasing numbers of
trade situations. Guidelines and other documents produced by
CODEX have become reference standards for international trade. It is
clear that all stakeholders from farm to fork play a role in ensuring
food safety. Current food safety legislation highlights the importance
of food safety controls that are scientific and proportionate to the
risks and emphasize the need to protect public health in a way that is
effective, proportionate, and based on risk analysis.

References
Allio, L., Ballantine, B., and Meads, R. 2006. Enhancing the role of science in the
decision–making of the European Union. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology
44(1):4–13.
Aruoma, O. I. 2006. The impact of food regulation on the food supply chain.
Toxicology 221:119–127.