The evolution of food safety and quality policies and practices in USA and UE. What‟s next?

International Journal of Agriculture & Environmental Science

© 2020 by SSRG - IJAES Journal

Volume 7 Issue 2

Year of Publication : 2020

Authors : Paola Cane, Debora Del Gais

10.14445/23942568/IJAES-V7I2P102

How to Cite?

Paola Cane, Debora Del Gais, "The evolution of food safety and quality policies and practices in USA and UE. What‟s next?," SSRG International Journal of Agriculture & Environmental Science, vol. 7,  no. 2, pp. 4-8, 2020. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.14445/23942568/IJAES-V7I2P102

Abstract:

The past forty years have seen a remarkable change in the regulatory environment in which the food industries operate: if the need of healthy and genuine food can be considered as old as manhood, food security is a relatively recent subject that has taken on increasing political, social and economic importance only in the last decades. The regulation of food safety has undergone major changes through both the public and private sector. Despite its recent history, food safety and quality are changing rapidly, becoming more stringent, both in developed and developing countries, through public and private quality control systems, in response to enhanced food safety problems. Private and public food safety regulations, standards and certification systems are responding to the consumer needs for safer foods throughout the whole farm to fork supply chain. In the meanwhile, food companies are seeking efficient means to assure food safety and quality in compliance with regulations across multiple countries. Despite all those efforts the global burden of food borne diseases is considerable: food recalls due to unsafe foods are growing every year (RAFSS, 2019; FDA, 2019), unsafe food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances, still causes more than 200 different diseases and an estimated 600 million – almost 1 in 10 people in the world – fall ill after eating contaminated food and 420 000 die every year, resulting in the loss of 33 million healthy life years (WHO, 2015). Moreover, new treads, that are likely to increase in the future for many reasons such as the globalization of production, the increasing complexity of product formulas, and the closer monitoring by both firms and institutions (Berman, 1999; Chen, 2009), are mining the food supply chain: from malicious contamination of food for terrorist purposes, to deliberate acts of food sabotage, from GMO to Dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are toxic chemicals that persist in the environment and accumulate in the food chain. The aim of this paper is to retrace the main evolution stages of food safety, to understand how it has radically changed from its dawns to the present day and questions what changes are necessary or foreseeable in the near future.

Keywords:

Food Safety, Food Defence, Food Fraud, Public health protection.

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