Tuesday 8 January 2013

NZ university to lead food security plan


Massey University is to help World Bank lead a plan to improve food safety worldwide.

Launched before Christmas, the Global Food Safety Partnership is a public-private partnership with the aim of increased food safety capacity.

Massey’s Professor of Agribusiness Hamish Gow (pictured), winner of a major international award for an open source food safety knowledge network, will take a leading role in the multi-agency structure.



“The goal is to build a food safety system suitable for supporting the delivery of safe, affordable food for everyone, everywhere, all of the time,” says Gow.

The partnership will utilise an open educational model that would enable individuals, firms, non-governmental organisations, governments and international agencies to collaborate.

Massey will facilitate the working groups that will provide technical input and expertise into the design of the partnership and associated programmes. Ross Davies of the School of Engineering and Advanced Technology in the College of Sciences will act as project manager for Massey’s part of the initiative.

These working groups will cover the establishment of the open source platform (or information resource), an effective communications strategy and technical aspects including training materials, quality control, service provision and delivery systems.

“We need innovative solutions to share best practice, increase adoption, build capacity, lower delivery costs and more generally improve food safety systems across the developing world,” Gow says.

“The science of food safety is already well established, what we need to do now is package that knowledge appropriately for food producers, manufacturers, retailers and distributors and consumers so it is relevant to them. It is not so much a scientific problem as a business development and community development problem.”