GAIN’s mission is to improve the consumption of nutritious and safe food for all people, especially those most vulnerable to malnutrition. As a nutrition organisation, we understand food safety to be a core component of our mission and our ability to achieve healthier diets. Safe food is essential for food security and nutrition, and it affects everything from what consumers eat, to their livelihoods, and their families’ health.
At the recent Codex Committee of Food Hygiene meeting that took place in late 2022, the Committee agreed to develop guidelines to improve food safety in traditional markets.
In a joint article with One Acre Fund earlier this year, we called for greater attention to be paid to smallholder farmers, whose role is essential if we are to fulfil the needs of an ever-growing population – even in the face of climate change, economic turbulence, conflict, and the many other disruptions that lie ahead.
This blog highlights findings related to gender from EatSafe's formative research. Women’s empowerment and gender equity are central to reducing the burden of foodborne illness and integral research, learning, and evaluation of food safety interventions.
2021 has marked a turning point for food safety in the global public discourse. The global COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted vulnerabilities in our food system, including the importance of food safety and its role in nutrition and health. We are starting to see the pressing need to establish capacity to support domestic food safety in low- and middle-income countries.
Today is International Youth Day, an awareness day created by the United Nations. The theme this year, "Transforming food systems: Youth innovation for human and planetary health", highlights the upcoming United Nations Food Systems Summit, an international event providing global leaders an opportunity to launch new policy and programmatic actions for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Food is traded both globally and locally. Yet even when consumers can purchase food from all over the world, local, "traditional" markets often provide the least expensive, freshest products with the shortest supply chains. And that is why local markets are ubiquitous and essential for feeding consumers of all types.
In late February, twenty-four World Food Prize Laureates penned a letter asking the Biden Administration for help. These internationally recognized and exceptional Laureates are known to have advanced the quantity, quality, availability of, or access to food through creative interventions within the food system.
Unsafe food and malnutrition can be twin threats to consumer health and create hurdles to achieving food security for consumers. Yet addressing these twin threats is vital to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 2, a bold call to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2030.
Scares involving food contamination tend to make headlines when they occur in high-income countries. These rare outbreaks are all the more dramatic because consumers usually take for granted that the food they purchase will be safe: in high-income countries, governments have rigorous food safety standards with staff and budgets to support their enforcement, and many major retailers establish their own standards and procedures for ensuring that the food on their shelves is safe to eat.