At a meeting of the world’s consumer goods industry leaders at the CGF Global Summit in South Africa, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) to signal their commitment to a large-scale partnership for food safety.
The goal of the partnership is to implement “a roadmap for scaling up” by developing large-scale food safety capability building projects in a number of key regions in the global food supply network.
This development program will be based on the GFSI Global Markets Program, which sets out how small or less developed food companies can meet the challenge of food safety and gain market access.
“The World Health Organization estimates that up to 600 million people fall ill every year after eating contaminated food,” said Philippe Scholtès, Managing Director, Program Development and Technical Cooperation at UNIDO. “ Our collaboration with GFSI will further strengthen and promote multiple benefits of safe food for social inclusiveness, sustainability and industrial development.”
This far-reaching food safety capability program will be implemented in a number of key geographies, starting with China, Southeast Asia and Africa before being continued in further regions.
- In China, the partnership aims to scale up food safety capacity building for local food enterprises throughout China in line with the Sustainable Supplier Development Program (SSDP) and establish the China Food Safety Initiative (CFSI).
- In South East Asia, the aim is to initiate a regional SSDP program, scaling up the UNIDO-AEON Malaysia SSDP program into a multi-country, and multi-buyer initiative.
- In Africa, the project will benefit from a strong UNIDO presence to design and build a joint UNIDO-GFSI multi-country, multi-buyer project for Africa on capacity building.
