Microbiological Risk Assessment Guidance for Food

NAKASHIMA, A.A.; GONZALES BARRON, U.; BOUCHRITI, N.; HARTNETT, E.; KARUNASAGAR, Y.; KIERMEIER, A.; KOUTSOUMANIS, K.; LI, F.Q.; ROSS, T.; SCHAFFNER, F.; SIGNORINI, M.L.; WANG, B.; ZWIETERING, M.

FAO-OMS

Lugar: Roma; Año: 2021 p. 288

978-92-5-134518-4

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was established underthe United Nations in 1947 as a series of international meetings at which nationswould work together to reduce tariffs and other barriers to eliminate unfair anddiscriminatory practices in international commerce. In relation to food, theoverarching principle was that export income from agricultural products was thefirst step in the economic development of many nations. Completion of the eighth,or ?Uruguay round?, of GATT negotiations, in 1994, led to the creation of the WorldTrade Organization (WTO).Importantly, the rules and disciplines of the WTO Agreements ? the Sanitaryand Phytosanitary (SPS) and the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreements? are designed to minimize the negative effect on trade of food safety measuresthat cannot objectively be justified. What this means is that scientific data andarguments and conclusions based on them, i.e. ?science-based? arguments, are theonly basis for restrictions to international trade in foods.The WTO recommendations specified the need for science-based food safetymeasures but, when those rules were introduced, there were no established,internationally accepted procedures for science-based assessment of microbiologicalfood safety risk. The development of science-based standards was consideredthe role of the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC). Accordingly, FAO and WHO established the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Meetings on Microbiological RiskAssessment (JEMRA) (FAO, 2021a) ? similar to the already well-established JointFAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) (FAO, 2021b) ? todevelop the methods and the tools needed to facilitate the WTO ambitions. Aspart of that process, CAC also developed a set of principles and guidelines for theconduct of microbiological food safety risk assessment (CAC, 1999).