GFSI and UNIDO Progress on Strategic Cooperation for Food Safety Capacity Building

Building a fitting partnership
UNIDO is giving full attention to food safety as a key thematic area in their inclusive and sustainable industrial development initiative (ISID) where partnership with the private sector is a key instrument, making for a fitting cooperation with GFSI whose vision is safe food for consumers everywhere. As a confirmation of this commitment, the UNIDO has incorporated this cooperation with GFSI into the UNIDO Terms of Reference recently announced by Mr. Li Yong, the UNIDO Director General. Both entities will jointly dedicate and mobilize resources in a strategic long-term plan to scale up food safety capacity building in priority regions.
 
This partnership builds on the successful collaborations between GFSI and UNIDO since 2009, and follows the outstanding achievements made under the recent sustainable supplier development project (SSDP) successfully implemented in Malaysia thanks to UNIDO and AEON, also based on GFSI Global Markets.
 
"To overcome global food safety challenges, we need to bring together the public and private sector, academia and international organizations and jointly deliver global solutions," said LI Yong, the Director General of UNIDO at a meeting with GFSI delegation at the Vienna Food Safety Forum in September 2016.
 
A Roadmap for Scaling Up
Following the joint declaration made by UNIDO and GFSI during the China Focus Day on 1st November 2015, the roadmap that is currently being crafted is designed to implement food safety capacity building projects in a number of countries based on the GFSI Global Markets Program. The Program sets out how small and less developed food companies can meet the challenge of food safety, increase productivity and gain market access. This will be enabled by UNIDO.
 
The new strategy will harness the focus of GFSI members, the interests of UNIDO and the maturity of GFSI in targeted geographies. Once launched, the program will focus on key regions in the global food network, beginning with China, Africa, Middle East and Southeast Asia in a long-term roadmap approach.

 

In China, the partnership aims to coordinate efforts to work jointly towards establishing the China Food Safety Initiative (CFSI) and to scale up food safety capacity building for local food enterprises in China according to the UNIDO model on the Sustainable Supplier Development Program (SSDP) from 2016 onwards.

 

In Africa, the project will benefit from a strong UNIDO presence to design and build a joint UNIDO-GFSI multi-country, multi-buyer project for Africa on capacity building.

 

In South East Asia, the ongoing discussions with key partners like the Food Industry Asia (FIA) and the Global Food Safety Partnership (GFSP) are aiming to initiate a regional SSDP program to scale up the UNIDO-AEON Malaysia SSDP program into a multi-country and multi-buyer initiative.

 

In the Middle East, a regional GFSI group is foreseen under the ongoing UNIDO regional food safety project to support the private sector role into the food safety harmonization efforts in the region.
 
Milestones and Priorities
The ongoing discussions aim to deliver specific milestones and timelines to carry out the strategy, formalized in a Memorandum of Understanding ahead of the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit taking place in South Africa this June 2016. Moving forward in the construction of this collaboration, GFSI is enthusiastic about the potential to have a bigger impact in a number of regions that act as critical links in the global food supply chain.