REPORT ON SCOPE OF MEAT SAFETY ASSURANCE SYSTEM AND COMPETENCIES AND ROLES OF RISK MANAGER

Food safety requires a farm-to-fork approach to be efficient. Among food products, meat represents a complex issue since to reach the market; it requires several processing stages and involves live animals. Within the meat chain, animal health and animal welfare need to be considered with specific competencies. Another complexity is the risks for human health, arising mainly from farms that need to be mitigated along the meat chain. The EU-level risk based meat safety assurance system (RB-MSAS) needs to consider all these characteristics, framing them with appropriate legislation and allowing different food chain contributors to act specifically, according to their roles, with the common aim of delivering safe food to consumers. Starting from current tools, and considering the medium to long term, private RB-MSAS schemes and food chain information are promising tools. Third party assurance schemes can partially offset the need for legal requirements and inspections; uptake of these schemes is higher where they are used to demonstrate compliance with regulation or inspection activities. An assurance scheme that simply mimics the law is unlikely to be able to frame itself as providing additional value to members. Similarly, if all RBMSASs were equal, they could not frame themselves as better than the competition. Therefore, there is a need to identify the aspects in which different private RB-MSASs are equivalent to public RB-MSASs. It would be also helpful to learn if the equivalence is due to having equal requirements to official controls (process-based) or to enabling equivalent results (outcomebased). FCI is a good starting point, but has space for improvement in terms of quality, quantity, effectiveness and ability to reach different actors across the production chain. FCI should exploit the potential of innovative information technologies to pair traceability and safety data, making them available to different private and public actors along the chain. Key components will be the two-way exchange of information between the primary producer and FBO as well as the availability of the FCI outside of the abattoirs.