Improving Regulatory Delivery in Food Safety
Mitigating Old and New Risks, and Fostering Recovery
This report describes how regulators around the world adapted to the confusion brought by the COVID-19 crisis to ensure the supply of food while maintaining food safety and security. It brings together examples of regulatory responses at regional, national and international levels. The report also discusses how, despite all the challenges, the pandemic has helped uncover new regulatory tools and foster a culture of flexibility and agility in regulatory systems.
Food safety challenges, informal markets, and their role in 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.
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