Jo Goodhew, New Zealand food safety minister, welcomed the signing of a Food Safety Arrangement between New Zealand and Indonesia.
“Signing of the Food Safety Arrangement demonstrates the commitment of New Zealand and Indonesia to further develop our bilateral relationship,” she said.
“The areas of cooperation range from food safety risk assessments through to formal post graduate education programmes in food safety and technology.”
The arrangement will increase cooperation and promote recognition and consistency between the regulatory systems of the two countries, said Goodhew.
“With its 250 million consumers Indonesia is not only an important market for New Zealand’s food exports, it is also a key member of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) with which Australia and New Zealand have a Free Trade Agreement,” she said.
“Signing of the Food Safety Arrangement is an important step towards strengthening our already strong relationship with Indonesia and the ASEAN region in general, and I look forward to seeing further progress in this area.”
The Food Safety Arrangement was signed in Wellington by Martyn Dunne, director-general Ministry for Primary Industries and Roy Sparringa, chairman of the Indonesian National Agency of Drug and Food Control.
FDA on global partnerships
Meanwhile, two published pieces on the FDA Voice blog have stressed the importance of co-operation for food safety.
Camille Brewer, director of international affairs at FDA’s Office of Foods and Veterinary Medicine and Christopher Hickey, FDA’s country director for the People’s Republic ofChina, talked about the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) region.
They said food safety is a priority area for APEC, shown by the Food Safety Cooperation Forum (FSCF), which has been co-chaired by China and Australia since being established in April 2007.
“In September, FDA joined colleagues for APEC food safety meetings in Beijing. Because of the importance of building the capacity for food safety protections in China and the region, China hosted a “Special Session” of FSCF to consider progress from technical working groups on export certificates and maximum residue limits of pesticide in food products,” the pair wrote.
FDA talked about how the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) creates tools to prevent food safety problems, and how its foreign offices are working with fellow regulators to bolster a coordinated approach.
“The value of these partnerships was evident in technical sessions of the meetings, which covered best practices in laboratory proficiency testing, pilot projects on export certificates in the wine industry, and the convergence of approaches to regulate maximum residue limits for pesticides in wine grapes,” according to Brewer and Hickey.
Standards and verification
Michael R. Taylor, FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said the success or failure of efforts to keep foods safe globally rests on the strength of partnerships and work done together to verify that standards are met, in a separate post.
He said it is investing heavily in new forms of partnership with major trading partners with the goal of relying on each other’s verification activities as an element of the overall assurance system as part of the Food Safety Moderinzation Act (FSMA).
“A prime example and model for collaboration is our joint initiative with Mexico to build a full operational partnership on produce safety, based on a strongly shared commitment to food safety as a public health goal,” according to Taylor.
“We are working directly with SENASICA and COFEPRIS – the agencies in Mexico that are responsible for produce safety – to expand the sharing of information, personnel and best practices, and to improve laboratory and other technical harmonization.”
In the US, 15% of the food supply is imported from other countries, including nearly 50% of fresh fruit and 20% of fresh vegetables. Last year, it exported a record $136bn in foods, feed and beverages.