Food – 500 million reasons to keep it safe

French President Charles de Gaulle once famously wondered, perhaps half in jest, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”

An even more difficult challenge is to ensure that thousands of dairy products, meat, fish, vegetables and fruit can be safely exchanged and consumed across an EU single market of 500 million citizens and 28 countries.

How do you make sure that food is safe and travels safely across the EU? How do you preserve, say, the purity of Gozo honey or the traditional production and distinctive flavour of the gbejna? At the European Commission, we strive to help EU countries answer these questions every day.

Ensuring the quality and safety of our food is not an easy task, but we can rely on a very solid basis of European and national legislation: it is actually the most stringent in the world, and it ensures safety at all stages of the food supply chain, from farm to fork. European standards and requirements guarantee a high level of food safety and nutrition, while maintaining a competitive, sustainable and innovative market. Thanks to this, the agri-food industry is the largest manufacturing sector in Europe, with an output which represents more than €410 billion and some 44 million jobs.

Yet, while having legislation in place is important, its implementation is just as essential. National and EU inspectors check farms, at borders, during transport, at slaughterhouses, at restaurants and supermarkets. More than 100,000 people perform official controls of some 20 million food operators within EU countries, and of all the food imports; and they cover every angle – food is inspected to look for pesticides, chemical residues, microbial contamination, hygiene, improper labelling, poor refrigeration, animal welfare and fraud. The EU's traceability system allows us to follow any product throughout the entire food chain, and to remove from the shelves any product which may have caused harm. And, last but not least, we maintain a robust crisis mechanism to keep pests and disease out of EU territory. We manage to do all this with an overall EU budget representing as little as 0.06 per cent of the output value of the food industry, and less than 50 cents per EU citizen.

We cannot ensure the sustainability and safety of our food if we don't tackle the emerging challenges, and in particular antimicrobial resistance (AMR), i.e. the ability of microbes to resist antibiotics. AMR is a huge public health threat, responsible for 25 000 deaths and over €1.5 billion in healthcare costs and productivity losses annually; it concerns human medicine, of course, but also the food and animal sector, due to the misuse and abuse of antibiotics in farm animals. Consequently, we need a "One Health" approach dealing with both human and animal health, with a concerted effort across countries since microbes know no borders. Therefore, this year we will propose an EU Action Plan to support national policies, innovation and research and the efforts of the World Health Organisation and the international community to reduce anti-microbial resistance.

Just as we must ensure the safety of our food, we should also be concerned with the staggering level of food waste in the EU: around 88 million tonnes of food are wasted annually, with associated costs estimated at €143 billion. There are no simple answers to such a complex issue, but we have gathered stakeholders in a European Food Waste Platform, currently working, among other things, on how to best measure food waste and on voluntary food donation guidelines.

Safety must go hand in hand with quality: as citizens strive for healthier and more balanced diets, we should look at the nutritional components of what we put on our plate, especially processed foods. The Commission is therefore working with member states on food reformulation, the common goal being to have less salt, fats and sugar in packaged foods; this should contribute to reducing child obesity, one of the priorities of the Maltese Presidency of the EU.

All these are difficult challenges that require the strong cooperation of many actors: we work on a daily basis with all the national authorities in the EU, be it to discuss regulations, provide food safety trainings or implement security measures whenever the need arises (for instance to contain avian flu). And there are many stakeholders – industry and consumers' organisations – with whom we engage constantly to improve regulations and their impact on people's daily life. We must all make sure the food we eat in Europe is safe, nutritious, high quality and affordable – and there are 500 million reasons to do so.

“Yet, while having legislation in place is important, its implementation is just as essential”