A PPP for Improving Food Safety Capacity Building: A Listening Session

UMD-JIFSAN, IAFNS, and Structured Partnerships invite you to a listening session as we look to establish a new Public-Private Partnership for Data Sharing to Improve Food Safety Capacity Building.

This listening session will focus on presenting and receiving comments on the proposed Public-Private Partnership outlined in the White Paper:  https://bit.ly/3gRzYOo.

Food safety is a global public good and fundamental for all societies. Foodborne diseases (FBDs), caused by ingesting contaminated food, is a significant source of morbidity and mortality around the world. As food supply networks become more globalized, food safety practices impact more than those producing and processing the products. Whole food industries are vulnerable, as are affected populations. Food safety capacity building efforts can improve global societal welfare. Food safety is foundational to many Action Tracks – especially Action Track 1 on Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All.

To know if such capacity building efforts are working, the impact of these efforts needs to be documented and examined.  Assessing such impact can help justify and galvanize future efforts or shift the focus to new or improved methods. These assessments need to be based on direct data, which needs to be shared for maximum understanding and utility.

Out of shared interest, this listening session brings representatives from the public and private sectors together to consider how to build a data sharing platform. The goal of this platform is for stakeholders (government, industry, the scientific community, and others) to agree on what data is needed to measure impact, to determine what data is already being collected, and to work toward greater data sharing and understanding. Recognizing that some of this data is proprietary and sensitive, one of the main goals of this PPP is to find shared ways to alleviate those concerns. If successful, this PPP is expected to both help government fulfill its mandate to improve food safety for the public good and enable companies providing food into the U.S. food chain to meet their obligations under FSMA more effectively, while also protecting these businesses from food shocks caused by FBD events.

Prior discussions among stakeholders have shown significant support for the formation of a PPP to share data that can help those involved improve the impact of food safety capacity building.  They recognize that this can in turn improve productivity, reduce FBDs, and ultimately improve public health.

As we move toward establishing a PPP with key stakeholders and other interested participants, please join us!

About the Convenors:

• Joint Institute of Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN) at University of Maryland  is a public and private partnership whose mandate largely is to improve food safety capacity globally. (https://jifsan.umd.edu/)
• The Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences (IAFNS) is a non-profit organization that catalyzes the creation of scientific knowledge to advance public health. (https://iafns.org)
• Structure Partnerships is a consultancy specializing in how to structure and design international partnerships. (https://www.structuredpartnerships.com/)