Page 54 - Trade and Food Standards

Figure 6: Risk analysis
analysis competency will enable participants to speak more effectively with trading partners. It is the language of technical negotiation without which delegates at Codex meetings, especially at the technical-committee level, would be unable to question, influence, justify or challenge the work being undertaken. Effective communication with public and other stakeholders is critical to engender confidence in the system: this is an essential element to facilitate trade.
In setting goals for capacity development, it is important to get the process under way, however modestly, based on the resources available. There are complex aspects but also simple initial steps that can be taken. It will take time for risk-analysis processes to reach maturity, but it is an investment worth making to obtain important results.
Risk communication
Interactive exchange
of information and opinions concerning risks
Ghana: a risk-based approach to tackle a chemical hazard in smoked fish
The people of Ghana eat a lot of smoked fish preserved using a traditional smoking process. FAO has collaborated with Ghana over many years to support this sector, most recently to develop a smoking technique that can control the contamination of smoked fish with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) – compounds associated with incomplete combustion that research has shown to be carcinogenic and thus a serious public health concern.
Ghana has national standards and codes of practice covering smoked fish, as well as programmes for the regulatory control of these products. However, they did not reflect modern risk-based approaches to food safety and did not take into account the risks posed by PAHs.
In 2016, using newly available data from a national study that
analysed contamination as well as levels of consumption of smoked fish, FAO worked with the Ghana Food and Drugs Authority to enable their staff to understand how to use their own data to assess and characterize risks.
This exercise demonstrated that a different smoking technique developed by FAO (the “FAO- Thiaroye de transformation du poisson” or “FTT processing technique”) led to a hundredfold reduction in contamination levels, effectively resulting in a “no risk” end-product through the application of good practices.
Ghanaian officials are now able to apply specialized risk assessment processes and appreciate the need to invest in codes of good practice as part of their food safety management approach.
Source: FAO
42 Trade and food standards
Risk Management
Policy Based
Risk Assessment
Science based
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