This report presents a collection of regulatory responses at regional, national and international levels to ensure food safety during the pandemic. The pandemic brought additional challenges in the food safety domain in both advanced and less advanced economies. Advanced economies, where food security is not usually a challenge, had not felt the scale of such a sanitary emergency in recent history – this made managing the crisis all the more challenging. In less advanced economies, on the other hand, infrastructure and technological limitations have made economic recovery more arduous. Despite the resilience displayed by food supply chains, the pandemic has placed several additional burdens on food business operators to ensure that food supplies continue at pre-pandemic levels while applying additional lockdown, social-distancing and safety rules. Emergency laws were passed in several jurisdictions, including the EU, to prevent regulatory processes from being unduly hampered or from unjustifiably hindering business activities.

The pandemic highlighted how developing nations play a crucial role in ensuring food chain safety and how rules and sanctions alone cannot achieve desired safety goals. Food plays an intricate role amongst human beings, and also reflects a society’s socio-economic and environmental condition. A wet market in China, where the novel corona virus is thought to have originated, raises the interesting debate of “supermarketisation” – a phenomenon where the private sector (super/hyper markets) contributes significantly to strengthening food value chains – and the rise of the elite. “Supermarketisation” is a situation where, influenced by the process of urbanization and income growth, traditional retail outlets and wet markets are increasingly replaced by modern retail outlets such as supermarkets. While wet markets are known to be a constant threat of zoonotic diseases, simply bringing in regulations to curb the spread of diseases from wet markets may not be effective. This is because wet markets are more than just a source of food for millions of poor people. They are invariably informal in their organisation and fundamental to the socio-economic functioning of the local communities within which they operate. Supermarkets are thought to disrupt this harmony. Therefore, first, the design of regulations needs to factor in these local contexts, for a food safety regulation may have unintended impacts in other areas. Second, achieving food safety requires a robust implementation infrastructure. Food safety regulatory delivery should rely as much as possible on “enabling and engaging” action that helps businesses focus on the “good” rather than just prevent the “bad”.

The reliability and safety of the food supply are fundamental to the existence and preservation of human societies, and food safety thus remains a prominent concern of citizens and policy makers, even in advanced economies where the quantity of supply is of less concern. Thus, from the onset of the COVID‑19 crisis, ensuring that food supplies remain both reliable and safe has been a key issue, even if made considerably less visible by the urgency of the health crisis created by the virus. Regulatory systems have had a critical role to play in this context – ensuring continued safety, while removing (as much as possible) barriers that may make it more difficult for the industry to continue operating in spite of the crisis.

In this opening chapter, we look at the interaction between the COVID-19 crisis and the food chain. While the pandemic is not a “food safety issue” in the strict sense, its emergence is linked in several ways to the food chain – and to safety of supplies, in particular veterinary issues. Regardless of the still imperfectly known mechanism of SARS-Cov-2 spread to humans, understanding better the ways in which zoonoses can lead to human pandemics, as well as how regulatory systems can help with reducing such risks, is essential. Particularly essential is to identify approaches through which regulatory systems in developing and emerging economies can support improved safety in the food chain, in contexts where imposing costly rules and rigid mechanisms are likely to be of limited effectiveness.

This chapter considers the challenges posed by widespread transformation of behaviour to improve safety (particularly in terms of health and epidemic control), seeking to build on the experience of the “culture of food safety” and how it has profoundly transformed practices over the past couple of decades. Difficulties in achieving compliance with COVID-19 safety measures has shown the urgency of going beyond mere rule-setting and formal enforcement, and designing strategies and programmes to promote and achieve safer conduct at work and in social life. Understanding how culture change and safety culture have been systematically built up in the food sector through a combination of methods, systems, management and regulatory attention, can provide an important contribution.

This chapter analyses the challenges that the COVID-19 crisis presents for the implementation and enforcement of food safety regulation. It discusses, in particular, different approaches adopted by food safety authorities to safeguard sustained compliance with food safety regulation under unprecedented circumstances including measures aimed at third-party auditors and certification bodies that play a role in ensuring the food security objectives are achieved.

This chapter discusses the opportunities that the COVID-19 crisis presents to rethink and optimise food safety regulation for the recovery. The pandemic has stressed the importance of reducing administrative barriers but also the need for regulations that effectively foster safe practices. Food supply systems showed resilience due to governments´ rapid implementation of temporary measures. Prioritisation and reduction of the number of physical controls did not lead to a safety crisis, and this highlighted the need for greater optimisation and efficiency of controls, and recognition of results of food safety management systems. Progress in technology and data management can help respond to the need for more co-operation and collaboration among control agencies and improved information exchange to improve efficiency and effectiveness of control measures.