Safe and quality food: A shared responsibility – A need for training and capacity building
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| Authors & editors | |
| Publisher | Milling & Grain |
| Year of publication | 2019 December |
| Languages | |
| Medium | Digital |
| Edition | 1 |
| Topics | |
| Tags | |
| Scope & content | By Raghavan (‘Ragha’) Sampathkumar Continuing from my last column, there are several areas where food chain stakeholders must join hands and invest to ensure food that reaches the consumer is safe and is of good quality at affordable prices. When looking at the Asian region, there are at least 600 million farmers and the majority are smallholders. In most countries, these smallholders neither have the knowledge and financial capacity individually to access domestic or export markets nor have any formalised institutional system to support them in terms of providing knowledge on best practices, technological know-how and most importantly, finance. These farmers are staring blankly at the fast growing food industry in Asia that is struggling to source good quality raw materials and agricultural produce. This situation is common across all commodities and needs concerted efforts by all stakeholders, this is essential to benefit both ends of the food chain – farmers and consumers. Some of the most critical aspects that require immediate attention are: safety (e.g. free from contamination); residue-free (e.g. chemicals, heavy metals etc.); and improved shelf life particularly for perishables. At one point of time, secondary standards were absolutely necessary to gain consumers’ confidence and as a result, premium prices... Read more. |
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