Feature Story A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO SUSTAINABLE FOOD SAFETY By Joelle Mosso, Associate Vice President, Science Programs
This is part two of a two-part series on food safety and sustainability. You can read the first part of this series in the September/October edition of the Western Grower & Shipper.
the agronomic system while assembling a multi-step process to mitigate risks for both sustainability and food safety. While the concept is straightforward, it is challenging to build a system for comprehensive farm characterization and monitoring due to the size and scope of all the variables. The direction may be clear, but the question quickly becomes, how would we begin? When we start to consider whole ecosystems, we must think broadly about measurement systems and targets since we have numerous factors that may have a positive relationship/ correlation, a negative relationship/correlation or a neutral relationship (i.e., independent). One of the reasons that food safety and sustainability efforts have sometimes felt at odds with one another is that it is much simpler to consider, in terms of food safety, a practice as either good or bad for food safety. This binary simplification is amenable to simple communication and alignment of actions. However, the reduction of complex questions to binary outcomes can lead to actions that are misaligned or even opposite of the intended results. For example, following the 2006 spinach outbreak, a common and recommended reaction was to remove non-crop vegetation to reduce interactions between wildlife and crops. Over time, removal of habitat has been shown to have no impact, or even increase the amount of wildlife in a production field due to the need for wildlife to find food, water and shelter. We must be careful of reducing complex questions to binary answers (good/bad) since those decisions can lead to poor unintended outcomes despite even the best of intentions. Risk-based decision-making and risk management require characterization of risk (e.g., pathogenic E.coli, Salmonella , heavy metals) in an environment, and then identifying the factors that can lead to changes in that risk. To achieve risk-based food safety management, a baseline understanding of the risk(s) is needed
Climate change is rapidly changing ecosystems worldwide, and there are increasing concerns about the long-term impacts that these changes may have on the stability, sustenance and growth of communities. Agriculture is accelerating efforts to understand and optimize practices to address changing conditions and ensure the security of a safe and nutritious food source. With rising temperatures, destabilized weather patterns and diminishing nonrenewable resources, the food supply chain must consider all factors when developing a food system aimed at long-term resilience. Overarching environmental pressures are nonselective and impact the entire ecosystem, including bacterial and viral pathogens contributing to human health risks. To be efficient and effective in building a resilient food supply chain, the complexities require a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach that designs for and balances the needs of sustainability and food safety together. Efforts for food safety are currently aimed at developing a risk-based management system with the goal of continuous improvement leading to ongoing risk reduction to consumers. Sustainable Food Safety (SFS) prioritizes the interconnectedness of sustainability and food safety efforts to ensure optimal outcomes, leading to the goal of environmental and agricultural resiliency. To ensure both efforts are addressed efficiently, monitoring systems must be developed to characterize the risk from all agronomic, food safety and sustainability practices. With a measurement process and monitoring system to understand outcomes, growers can align the management of
23 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com November | December 2024
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