World Food Safety Day June 7th 2023
Theme: “Food Standards save lives”
To sustain life and advance good health, one must have access to adequate supplies of healthy food. Food borne illnesses are typically contagious or poisonous in nature and frequently difficult to detect with the naked eye. The causative agents are bacteria, viruses, parasites, or chemical agents that enter the body through contaminated food or drink.
The World Food safety day is set aside to promote awareness of the issues related to poor food standards and encourage actions to help prevent, diagnose, and minimize dietary hazards, promoting economic growth, agricultural productivity, market access, tourism, and sustainable development.
Food safety is essential to ensuring that food is safe at all points along the food chain, including cultivation, harvesting, processing, storing, distribution, and even preparing and consuming it.
Food that is unsafe to consume poses a threat to human health and economy, hurting those who are economically disadvantaged greatly, including women, children and people living in conflict zones, with an estimated 600 million cases of food borne diseases each year. Around the world, an estimated 420,000 deaths are recorded annually after consuming contaminated food, with 125,000 of those deaths occurring in children under the age of five, who account for 40% of the burden of food borne illness. (WHO, 2022)
This year’s theme “Food standards save lives” is aimed at recognizing the value of international food standards in ensuring the safety of consumers while encouraging a fair trade in food.
In order to ensure a healthy soil and plant structure that will yield standard foods, EERC is raising awareness by urging farmers to adopt climate smart practices such as the use of organic products on farmlands in place of chemical herbicides which will help to maintain soil fertility and sustainability, use of improved variety seeds which will lead to increased productivity.
Food safety involves everybody in the food chain and so we should always remember that “quality is never an accident but the result of intelligent efforts”- John Ruskin.