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World Food Safety Day is observed annually on 7 June to help prevent, detect and manage foodborne risks.
About World Food Safety Day
- The UN believes that access to sufficient amounts of safe food is the key to sustaining life and promoting good health.
- World Food Safety day has a crucial role in assuring and educating people about food production, how it can stay safe at every stage of the food chain, and highlighting other things like food processing, storage, and production.
- WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) jointly facilitate the observance of World Food Safety Day, in collaboration with Member States and other relevant organizations.
- WFSD reinforces the call to strengthen the commitment to scale up food safety made by the Addis Ababa Conference and the Geneva Forum in 2019 under the umbrella of “The Future of Food Safety”.
Objective:
To focus on food security and highlight different areas relating to human health, economic prosperity, agriculture, market access, and tourism, and sustainable development.
Theme
- This year’s theme is Safe food today for a healthy tomorrow’.
- It discusses the fact that the production and consumption of safe food have immediate and long-term benefits.
- This year’s theme, ‘Safe food today for a healthy tomorrow’, stresses that production and consumption of safe food has immediate and long-term benefits for people, the planet and the economy.
- Recognizing the systemic connections between the health of people, animals, plants, the environment and the economy will help us meet the needs of the future.
History of World Food Safety Day
- In 2018 the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that June 7 would be regarded as World Food Safety Day every year.
- This came into effect after the intergovernmental organization noted that the burden of foodborne diseases was affecting children under the age of 5 and persons living in low-income counties.
- In 2020 the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to further strengthen global efforts of food safety to reduce the burden of foodborne disease.
Food crisis
- With an estimated 600 million cases of foodborne illnesses annually, unsafe food is a threat to human health and economies, disproportionately affecting vulnerable and marginalized people, especially women and children, populations affected by conflict, and migrants.
- An estimated 420 000 people around the world die every year after eating contaminated food and children under 5 years of age carry 40% of the foodborne disease burden, with 125 000 deaths every year.
- Unsafe food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances causes more than 200 diseases
- Recent estimates indicate that the impact of unsafe food costs low- and middle-income economies around US$ 95 billion in lost productivity each year
Source: TOI
