Challenges

Every year, about 420,000 people die from eating contaminated food. Food business operators (FBO) have the most critical role and responsibility to ensure that consumers’ health is preserved by producing food that is safe and nutritious. To do so, they have to implement food safety management systems and to comply with food safety regulatory requirements. Competent authorities must verify that the FBOs comply with such requirements and are able to protect the health of consumers and ensure fair practices in the food trade when producing or processing food. Unfortunately, competent authorities do not always have the resources or the personnel to control all the FBOs present in the country.

Toward a Solution

More and more, companies in the food sector are voluntarily deciding to use food safety and quality third party assurance programmes to demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements. A voluntary third party assurance programme (vTPA) has been defined by Codex as “an autonomous scheme comprising of the ownership of a standard that may utilize national/international requirements; a governance structure for certification and conformity assessment that provides for periodic onsite audits of FBO operations for conformity with the standard, and in which FBO participation is voluntary”. The information and data generated by vTPA can be beneficial to National Food Control Systems, enabling competent authorities to target inspections according to the risk posed by food businesses and to direct their resources more effectively.

Recently, the Codex Committee on Food Import and Export Inspection and Certification Systems (CCFICS) has developed Principles and Guidelines for the assessment and use of voluntary third-party assurance programmes. Two STDF funded projects called “Piloting of the use of voluntary third party assurance programmes (vTPA) ”, one implemented in Mali and Senegal by UNIDO, and the other implemented in Belize and Honduras by Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), aim to test and evaluate how this new Codex guidelines can be used in practice by government authorities in the four countries to improve food safety outcomes for consumer protection and fair practices in food trade based on public-private collaboration. The project will also help identify capacity and infrastructure gaps in the countries and seek solutions to address them.

Being a new approach, UNIDO has organized a series of webinars aimed at improving understanding and knowledge of the different regulatory options for the use of data generated by APTv programmes. Regulators from the UK Food Standards Agency, the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority and the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety as well as the Ministry for Environment, Agriculture, Conservation and Consumer Protection of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, have shared experiences and lessons learned from a regulatory perspective, in the recognition of vTPAs in their countries.

With the objective to mobilize expertise and resources to support results under the projects in West Africa and Central America, UNIDO has convened a vTPA Partnership Platform. At quarterly meetings, members of the platform from the public and private sector, who join on a voluntary basis, dialogue and discuss opportunities for collaboration, committing to share financial or in kind resources to contribute to the project’s activities and results. So far, in addition to the experiences shared by the competent authorities in countries where the vTPA approach is applied, members of the food industry have delivered webinars with the four countries and one in-country training in West Africa. In a training organized by UNIDO in Senegal in May, British Retail Consortium Global Standard (BRCGS), the Food Safety System Certification 22000 (FSSC 22000) and International Featured Standards (IFS) trained more than 80 people on different certification options for food producers and processors, highlighting the benefits for businesses as well as for competent authorities by using the APTv approach. Participants from competent authorities, private sector companies producing or processing horticultural products, and consulting firms that assist companies in the process of certification from Mali and Senegal learned about the basics of a food safety management system scheme and were exposed to three of the most important vTPAs.

The use of the vTPA approach will allow competent authorities in the countries to focus their interventions on high-risk areas and premises, while benefiting producers from a reduction of official controls and greater market access due to independently verified compliance with standards by the vTPA owners. The experiences and lessons learned from the projects will serve as an example to other countries seeking to improve their National Food Control Systems.