Africa's No.1 Food Safety, Quality & Compliance Magazine
GLOBAL – A recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publication has described how certain food safety considerations need to be taken into account to ensure acceptable health outcomes in situations where the impact of food insecurity is mitigated through food aid. Food security exists when people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet the…
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NIGERIA – The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has partnered with the federal government of Nigeria in a bid to curtail the current threat posed by the deadly aflatoxins on food production, preservation and consumption. Aflatoxins are a family of toxins produced by certain fungi that are found on agricultural crops including maize, peanuts, cottonseed, and tree nuts. They present…
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GLOBAL – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) experts committee has affirmed that precautionary allergen labelling (PAL) on pre-packaged foods should only be reserved for those situations where inadvertent allergen presence (UAP) cannot be avoided and should not make up for poor allergen management practices or production errors during food manufacturing.…
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EASTERN AFRICA – The Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS), regulatory agency responsible for assurance on the quality of agriculture inputs and produce, are training 18 diagnostic experts from the nine countries that comprise the FAO Eastern Africa sub-region, to detect a new invasive mealy-bug pest that has arrived in the Eastern Africa sub region, called the Mango Mealy- bug.…
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GLOBAL – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), has hailed the Codex Alimentarius’ food standards for laying a strong foundation to ensure the foods that we grow, produce, process, trade and consume are safe. The FAO Director General, QU Dongyu, addressed the opening of the 44th session of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the United Nations body…
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GLOBAL – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has upgraded its global animal disease information platform, the EMPRES-i+ system, to better support countries in identifying, mitigating and even forecasting severe animal diseases, like African Swine Fever (ASF). EMPRES-i+ replaces an earlier version, EMPRES-i, which was first launched in 2004 and has been widely used by hundreds…
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GLOBAL – The Food and Agriculture Organization has published the threshold levels in foods of the priority allergens arrived at in the second in a series of three meetings of an ad hoc Joint FAO/WHO Expert Consultation on Risk Assessment of Food Allergen. The meeting was held from 15 March to 2 April 2021. An Expert Committee, comprising scientists, regulators,…
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PACIFIC ISLAND COUNTRIES – The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), is currently employing interventions in the Pacific Islands to back the formulation of food control legislation (Fiji); deliver training laboratory services and improve food safety, hygiene and biosecurity in fresh markets and enhance capacities for participation in Codex standard-setting. Many Small Island Developing States (SIDS) treasure their traditions and uphold…
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ZAMBIA/ZIMBABWE – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) through its Virtual Learning Centre for Southern Africa (SFS-VLC) has launched an online course to bolster the capacity of Farmer Field School (FFS) facilitators and master trainers in Zambia and Zimbabwe to prepare and run quality poultry-focused FFS. The course will broaden their knowledge and skills in FFS facilitation in…
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GLOBAL – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) have published a review of risk assessment tools for Vibrio in 2020 that covers an expert meeting held at the Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) in the United Kingdom, in order to provide an update on the state-of-the-art advice regarding…
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