FederalMinisterofFoodandAgriculturewants to optimize food monitoring
Dec 12, 2019 - Foods
FederalMinisterofFoodandAgriculturewants to optimize food monitoring
Due to the recent food crises, both foodwatch and the vzbv (Federation of German Consumer Organisations) are calling for a reform of food monitoring. The government wants to act accordingly and decided on several points in a meeting at the end of October and published a press release.
The main demands are:
First: The states must organize food monitoring in such a way that there are no conflicts of interest regarding the local businesses. The inspections and the inspectors must be independent.
Second: All involved authorities must be provided with sufficiently qualified personnel. When it comes to people's health, savings cannot be made. Because without staff, there are no inspections.
Third: Communication must be improved. Above all, there needs to be better infrastructure for exchanging data and information between authorities. For this purpose, the Federal Minister commissioned a study on how such a central IT infrastructure could look concretely.
Fourth: The Ministry will present an analysis structure where the "fingerprints" of pathogens found in food can be compared with samples from sick people. This will allow contamination and infection pathways to be routinely traced in the future. This will significantly increase the detection rate of disease outbreaks related to food.
Fifth: Product recalls must be faster, for this, uniform formats are needed. Local authorities must be able to determine more quickly which products are affected. It helps the authority if it can give food entrepreneurs guidelines on the timing and form of traceability. The Federal Minister has already initiated a legislative change to this end. This creates the prerequisites for the federal government to give the responsible authority the ability to give the food entrepreneur instructions on how the notification must look.
Due to these changes, it is likely that the LFGB will be amended or supplemented again. We will keep you informed about further developments.
If you have any questions, we are happy to assist you.
Source: www.bmel.de