Conference to explore food safety

Helen Darling.
Helen Darling.
Keeping New Zealand's food products and food exports safe will be explored at a conference in Auckland in June.

The Food Integrity 2017 conference is being organised by Asia Pacific Centre for Food Integrity director, Dr Helen Darling, of Cromwell.

International and national food experts would help local companies navigate the complex international food export market place, helping them understand the risks and how to mitigate them.

International speakers included lawyer William Marler, the most successful litigator against food-borne illness in the United States, who would discuss his experiences, experts from the US Food Protection and Defence Institute talking about food fraud and China Food Safety magazine editor-in-chief Kevin Wang.

There was also a group coming from Guizhou, China, including Prof Hong Tan, president of the Guizhou Academy of Science.

Since 2013, she has led the effort in building the food safety cloud, one of the key big data projects in Guizhou province. That cloud now contained data of more than 40,000 agricultural products.

Following the conference, which is being held on June 28 and 29, a specialist one-day intentional adulteration course will be held.

It would be run by the Food Protection and Defence Institute to help food producers develop strategies to guard against acts intended to cause wide-scale harm to their consumers and ruin brand reputation.

Dr Darling hoped between 120 and 150 would attend the conference, saying last year's conference was ''quite interactive'' and, by keeping it relatively small, people could make connections.

The conversation around food safety was still outside the realm of many food producers and also New Zealand. Those wanting to export needed to be up-to-date with it, she said.

Indications were that it was going to be the worst year for food fraud. One example was a very low olive crop in the Mediterranean, meaning olive oil was likely to be misrepresented.

Food fraud was likely to increase, as there was a move away from collaboration and co-operation to protectionism and isolation, making it easier for people to get away with it, she said.

That was not going to be good for New Zealand agriculture and producers had to be far more proactive. Paranoia was also likely to increase around food, she believed.


 

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