Every year the issue of food security becomes more and more acute. The number of nitrates and heavy metals in vegetables, unacceptable GMOs, and other harmful substances is increasing daily. A system that guarantees the reliability and harmlessness of food works solely if there is a clear division of responsibilities and duties. In this regard, agricultural, processing, trade, control bodies, scientists, and politicians have specific responsibilities. With international trade flows and constant modifications to products, production processes, and marketing methods, work on food security is ongoing. Despite this intense activity, the cases of tampering and bioterrorism continue to plague health. There are numerous barriers to quality production, only safety standards and their conscientious implementation can be effective measures in the fight for health.
Tampering
Tampering is the deliberate deception of consumers regarding the composition of products for economic gain. Although the vast majority of food adulteration incidents pose no risk to public health, there are examples of actual and potential health dangers to consumers. The most prominent example is the melamine crisis, which arose when several manufacturers (PRC) began adding melamine to food. These actions were done to change their amount of protein, including powdered milk for baby formula for the first year of life. It has led to mass poisonings and even the death of children who received such recipes (300,000 victims, six children died) (Gizaw, 2019). Unfortunately, numerous other examples of adulteration exist to improve taste, change characteristics or reduce costs.
There are multiple cases where tampering can go undetected. However, every year in all countries of the world, there are cases of non-compliance of food products with the declared quality and safety criteria. The number of such claims depends on the peculiarities of the organization of their detection in different countries and the degree of development of their scientific and experimental base (Gizaw, 2019). The food supply has a very high risk for the possibility of substitution of ingredients, as it is challenging to distinguish adulterated food visually. Therefore, each product chain participant needs to analyze the vulnerability to adulteration at its stage and implement measures to minimize the risk of counterfeiting. Its detection affects the company’s reputation, entails financial losses, administrative fines, and in the case of harm to human health – even criminal penalties. At the same time, apart from counterfeiting, there are other ways to harm the consumer, and bioterrorism is one of the most dangerous.
Bioterrorism
In the case of tampering with food products, the risk to the consumer’s health is due to negligence or lack of understanding of this danger. At the same time, bioterrorism implies that the offender intentionally causes harm to the consumer (Fung et al., 2018). The reasons for bioterrorism are distinct; they include ideological when the activists desire to harm their competitors by spoiling products; behavioral, which refers to the unlawful behavior of employees in the workplace, and psychological.
However, it is not so much the reasons that motivate abusers to harm large numbers of people as the potential danger of their actions. For example, recently, Australian supermarkets began recalling strawberries en masse after a 21-year-old man was hospitalized (Fung et al., 2018). He swallowed a needle that had ended up inside the berry. During the inspection of the recalled products, the needles were found in strawberries of seven Australian producers. There have been more than 60 significant incidents involving consumer complaints, cases of poisoning, and other severe health consequences (Fung et al., 2018). Therefore, the threat of bioterrorism cannot be ignored nowadays. Food industry players must implement effective protection strategies that, among other things, help ensure regulatory compliance and, secondly, build consumer confidence in the brand. After numerous confirmed incidents of intentional food poisoning or spoilage, requirements for developing such schemes are tightening worldwide, and their implementation is mandatory at the legislative level in multiple countries.
Food Safety Standards
There are numerous food control systems, and it is essential to consider the most operated ones. ISO is the most prominent system of international standards. The most common and widely used industries of different types of these standards are ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 – they regulate the requirements for quality management system, environmental management, and much more (Jurica, 2021). The ideology of the standards is increasing international requirements for improving the level of mechanization and automation of the production process, and the severe tightening of sanitary conditions for the production of food products.
Moreover, the food safety management system implies primarily preventive action, control, and assessment of potentially hazardous factors (HACCP) arising in production. It includes all stages, from receipt of raw materials to the sale of finished products. HACPP eliminates the dependence on the results of selective control of finished products, shifting the focus to the manageability of production and service processes (Jurica, 2021). The system focuses on critical control points where all risks associated with food consumption can be prevented, eliminated, and reduced to an acceptable level by targeted control measures. Moreover, ISO 22000 contains well-defined safety practices related to assessing hazards, establishing critical control points, and establishing various prerequisite programs (Jurica, 2021). It uses risk analysis to define a strategy to manage risks and link prerequisite programs to the HACCP plan. It shows that the standards are diverse, but they all complement each other, increasing their implementation’s effectiveness.
Food Safety Barriers
The intensive development of agriculture and industry has led to an increase in harmful emissions of liquid and gaseous technical waste to humans. Numerous producers consider economic benefits, forgetting about the mandatory quality assessment and preservation of consumer health, which is a barrier to the safety of products. Crossing national borders by pathogens and contaminants means that foodborne diseases now threaten global public health security. The international dimension of the issue is indicated by recent events involving both chemical and microbiological contaminations of food by traditional or novel pathogens.
Pollution and climate are significant barriers, however, several others can be added to this list. Lack of national safety standards, human attitudes, and inadequate equipment are foremost among them (Soon & Abdul, 2022). Overcoming these barriers is a challenge, while to achieve safety, it is crucial to begin understanding the nature of the problem. It is necessary to adjust the approach to product certification fundamentally. Monitoring, or the system of constant observations over the purity and level of contamination of raw materials and food products with alien substances, involves the creation of a regulatory and methodological framework in each country.
Conclusion
Food security is a complex problem that requires numerous efforts to solve, on the part of producers, epidemiological services, government agencies, and consumers. The relevance of the food crisis is increasing every year since it ensures the security of products, which is one of the main factors determining human health and the preservation of the gene pool. Nowadays, with food, the human body can get significant amounts of substances that are dangerous to health. Therefore, there are acute issues associated with increased accountability for the effectiveness and objectivity of quality control. Unfortunately, the matters of adulteration and food terrorism do not lose their relevance, and only the active actions of each producer and buyer can adjust to this crisis.
References
Fung, F., Wang, H. S., & Menon, S. (2018). Food safety in the 21st century. Biomedical journal, 41(2), 88-95.
Gizaw, Z. (2019). Public health risks related to food safety issues in the food market: A systematic literature review. Environmental health and preventive medicine, 24(1), 1-21.
Jurica, K., Brčić Karačonji, I., Lasić, D., Bursać Kovačević, D., & Putnik, P. (2021). Unauthorized food manipulation as a criminal offense: Food authenticity, legal frameworks, analytical tools and cases. Foods, 10(11), 2570.
Soon, J. M., & Abdul W. (2022). A Bayesian approach to predict food fraud type and point of adulteration. Foods, 11(3), 328.