Strengthening the links in global food-safety supply chains
26/12/2008
Strengthening the links in global food-safety supply chains
Article by Trevor McManus, Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance food safety specialist.
Concerns about the quality of China’s food have again been cast into the global spotlight this week, although these problems are far from isolated to the world’s most populous nation. Sadly, there appears to be an increasing trend towards large-scale food safety incidents across the globe and there is no country or region immune to this issue. There have been significant incidents in most of the world’s developed economies recently as we struggle to meet the surging demand for food.
Food is now a globally traded commodity. Supply chains – from production to consumption – are very complex, traversing and even re-traversing the globe, and there are an increasing number of stakeholders – producers, processors, distributors, importers, exporters, retailers and regulators. Furthermore, the most important stakeholder – the consumer – has more diverse needs and greater expectations on both variety and quality. Any one of these stakeholders can compromise the safety of the food, whether it is produced in the neighbour’s garden or on the far side of the planet. In simple terms, what is increasingly needed is “supply chain assurance”. At any point from “farm to fork” there needs to be a high level of confidence that the processes are safe.
How then do we instil these disciplines in a global supply chain that involves so many diverse stakeholders – with often competing interests – and governments? The knee-jerk reaction is to say “we need to test our food more”, with the logical extension of this impulse being to test “everything for everything” at every stage of the supply chain. This, of course, is neither rational nor feasible, especially in the complex interdependent environment that is the modern food supply chain. Even the most technically sophisticated and ethical companies in countries noted for their food safety credentials – from Japan to Ireland – have been caught up recently in large-scale incidents where much suffering has been caused by a failure to maintain “supply chain assurance”.
How then do we build this assurance, locally and across national borders? The answers are available, but they are complex and not easy to apply. First, any food business needs to be commercially viable, but there needs to be ethical financial treatment of all stakeholders. Squeezing supply-chain partners may generate short-term profit, but it can tempt the partner to compromise safety. Further, all partners need to embrace an independent third-party assessment of their safety assurance programmes. Confidence in safety performances can only be assured where there is independent verification. Governments, certification bodies and companies alone cannot independently provide this: there must be a transparent sharing of the verification responsibilities. There also needs to be a common framework for food safety assurance, with compliance secured by an unbiased verification that stakeholders have “ticked all the boxes”. A common framework, in fact, has existed for nearly 40 years. Known as Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), it evolved from an American space programme in the 1960s.
But while HACCP contains the basic principles for safe food production, it lacks independent verification because it has been adopted by partisan and non-partisan groups. Still, HACCP has been incorporated by the independent International Standards Organisation into the global food-safety management system, known as ISO22000, which is widely available. Any solution to food-safety problems must incorporate global standards while being tailored to the specific safety needs of the food industry. It must combine the ethical financial treatment and education of stakeholders as well as transparent independent verification of safety programmes.
The solutions to this global dilemma may not be simple, but they are available.
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