2016-11 Delivering on EU food safety and nutrition in 2050 – Future challenges and policy preparedness

At the EU Specialty Food Ingredients Annual General Meeting held on 15th November, Mr Ladislav MIKO,  Deputy Director General Food Safety at DG SANTE, delivered an insightful presentation “Delivering on EU Food Safety and Nutrition in 2050 – Future challenges and policy preparedness”, as part of a foresight project for future food policy development. 

The purpose of this project is to provide insight and guidance to future policy-making in order to preserve the high standards of safe, nutritious, high quality and affordable food for EU consumers by identifying the:

• critical challenges to EU food legislative framework;
• future evolution of the challenges (in years 2020, 2030 and 2050);
• impacts of current challenges on EU’s food legislative framework;
• potential critical changes in the current framework necessary to maintain the prevailing high standards.

For this purpose, several scenarii were considered and explored, based on the identification of key drivers of food safety and nutrition in 2050, as well as related uncertainties surrounding their future evolution. The audience was particularly interested to hear about the potential policy options to address the main identified  challenges of the scenario “Pharma Food” with focus on nutrition and health about nutrition and diet, i.e.  the potential drawbacks of personalised nutrition and “phoods”; the ability to perform official food-related controls;the suitability of the current EU assessment procedures for new food ingredients, foods products and food-related technologies (incl. suitability of exposure data and maximum residue levels). EU Specialty Food Ingredients Members are looking forward to the upcoming publication of the final report.