Food Safety and Foodborne Disease Surveillance Systems: Proceedings of an Iranian-American Workshop (2006)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

Food Traceability: A Response to Consumers Dr. Alfredo M. Montes Niño International Consultant, Food and Agriculture Organization— World Health Organization I will start with some definitions of traceability as it refers to food. This term and the concept behind it also apply to other industrial products. In the food area, traceability is important for commercial and safety reasons. Definitions allow us to distinguish the scope covered by this concept and establish legal require- ments. Possible consequences of the legal requirements are violations of estab- lished rules that end up as disputes or cases. The importance of Codex Alimentarius definitions, as you may know, is that these standards have been adopted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in its Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement as practically the highest standards that a country can set for its import requirements. • Codex Alimentarius: “Traceability is the ability to follow the food move- ment through its specified stages at production, processing, and distribution” (WHO/FAO, 2004). The European Union (EU) has established its own definition. This has to be considered in cases of exports to that region despite the right of countries to initiate actions within the scope of WTO procedures. • Rule EC 178/2002, Article 3: “The ability to trace and follow a food, feed, food-producing animal or substance intended to be, or expected to be in- corporated into a food or feed through all stages production, processing and distribution” (EU, 2002). 73 

74 FOOD SAFETY AND FOODBORNE DISEASE SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS As mentioned, definitions are needed for different purposes, but for practi- cal purposes a more descriptive explanation is necessary. Traceability is a group of actions, measures, and procedures that reveal a product’s history, from its birth until the end of the commerce chain, passing through all intermediary production processes. Traceability in the food chain was initially raised as a proposal of the EU. Originally it was created to control taxes along the wide and varied commercial channels through which cattle moved within that ever more communal territory. The trigger was the mad cow disease crisis in 1996 that generated mandatory and voluntary requirements for the traceability of cattle and beef in the EU. Consum- ers’ frustration and general discredit of the traditional control systems prompted the implementation of a new system that would generate greater credibility among consumers. This crisis also led to changes in the organization of food control within the European Commission and to the creation of the European Food Safety Agency. In the wake of the latter, corresponding institutions were created in the EU’s member countries. Implementation of a total traceability system for cattle and beef requires the following two elements: identification and registration of bovine animals and labeling of beef and beef products. Needed to achieve such a system are the following: • documentation concerning the origin and all transportation or relocation of bovine animals; • regaining the consumer’s confidence in beef by labeling it with informa- tion concerning origin and slaughtering; and • obtaining at least minimum information on the beef imported from third- party countries. Currently, the identification of each animal is under discussion. A decision on mandating animal identification has been postponed. For the moment the accepted means of identification include the following: • ears tags; • a passport; • a record of all transport from birth (or importation) to slaughter of each animal, with this record in a central database within each member state; and • individual registries on each farm. Although a voluntary system has been in place since January 1, 2005, a traceability system ought to be established for all food. The labeling of beef has already been implemented and the system’s main characteristics are: 

FOOD TRACEABILITY 75 • an indication of the member state(s) or other countries where the animal was born, fattened, and slaughtered; • the abattoir’s and deboning hall’s approval numbers; and • a reference number that links the meat and the animal. As mentioned above, traceability of products through the food supply chain is in response to the European consumer’s desire for full traceability in order to guarantee safety, quality, authenticity, and rapid response. The final response to these needs is still in process and a final definition of traceability has yet to emerge from the diverse numbering systems, barcodes, electronic tags, biologi- cal markers, and communication systems. The effectiveness of responding rapidly to these increasing consumer de- mands was proven during the recent bovine spongiform encephalopathy and avian influenza crises. Certain supermarkets in the United Kingdom had already gained a reputation for selling products that were traceable. Consequently, the sale of the sensitive products at these shops did not decrease during the crisis; they increased considerably. The above scenario provides an example for countries that want to maintain, increase, and even diversify their food exports. The safety of their food products must be linked clearly to practical, efficient, and transparent identification sys- tems capable of offering importers a useful tool for satisfying both the new legal requirements in their countries and consumers’ demand for reliable information. REFERENCES EU (European Union). 2002. Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council, Official Journal of the European Communities. Available at http://europa.eu.int/eur- lex/pri/en/oj/dat/2002/l_031/l_03120020201en00010024.pdf. Accessed November 18, 2005. WHO/FAO Codex Alimentarius Commission, Report of the Twenty-Seventh Session, Geneva, 28 June-3 July 2004. WHO/FAO, Rome, 2004. Available at http://www.fao.org/documents/ show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/007/y5549e/y5549e00.htm. Accessed November 18, 2005.