“Nutrition is the principle of life”, and to defend it the Conference on Food Fraud has been opened in Rome on 23rd October. Conceived as a platform to discuss how to strengthen the communication and collaboration among all actors involved in the fight against food frauds and fraud-related crime, the conference has gathered together top experts from food law enforcement authorities, police, customers, judicial authorities, industry stakeholders and researchers.
The different types of food frauds include
adulteration, counterfeiting, substitution (e.g. a selected fish substitutes
with a lower quality one, sold at the same price) and deliberate mislabelling
of goods. The adulteration of food could also pose potential health risks, but
it is not only about that: it is always an intentional action carried out for
financial gain. High-grade frauds are those made with food of low quality and
low cost for the producer, but without appreciable and immediate effects on
health.
According to the European
Parliamentary Research Service, food chain in Europe is worth some €750
billion a year. The agro-food industry is the EU’s second biggest industrial
sector, employing 48 million workers in 17 million companies. Thus, food fraud
“endangers the credibility of European culture”, as the Italian health Minister
said. In fact, losing consumers’ faith has the direct consequence of sale
decrease with a big economic damage, comprising the lack of taxes payments. For
these reasons, in a context of arbitration, the financial crime must also be
considered and punished.
Moreover, food frauds could represent a big damage for Europe also because
there are police forces dedicated to weapons, drugs or women traffics, but
there are less controls for food, making the fraud an easy way to gain money
with low probability of punishment.
The world food fraud monitoring
In the European context, the phenomenon of food fraud has intensified in the last years: in 1980, 20,000 European citizens have been intoxicated by adulterated olive oil and, starting from 2000, authorities have registered about one big fraud per year.
In 2001 the cow meat, in 2007 the melamine
in pet's food, and during the following year 300,000 Chinese children got sick
because of the same stuff in milk leading to kidney failure. Finally, in 2013
there has been the horse
meat scandal, when many consumers have paid a high price for a cheaper
substitute of beef meat.
The US Pharmacopoeia Convention (USP), which set up a global database of
independently documented examples of food fraud, added almost 800 new records,
based on information published in scholarly journals and the media in 2011 and
2012. Milk, vegetable oils and spices have consistently appeared in the list of
ingredients most prone to fraud.
Carmen Bureau, Head of Unit of European Commission DG Health and Consumers, said: “it’s necessary to create a legislation able to pass national boundaries and to embrace all food fraud related crimes, associated to a strong cooperation between independent authorities working against food fraud”.
The Europe actions against food fraud
In order to gain the consumers faith, it is
necessary to strengthen an accurate information about origin and contents of
foods. For this reason, on 13th December 2014, new
rules for foods labelling will be applied.
Moreover, in the context of controls for food safety, the Rapid Alert System
for Food and Feed (RASFF) has to be fortified: the public
access portal is a way to share information among the 28 European Countries, in
order to rapidly recall the adulterated foods from the market, but also to
collect data and create reports about the food fraud.
Rules
to set up coordinated controls among European countries within
well-established terms, and learning programmes for experts and authorities in
food fraud fight, have still to be defined. Meanwhile, the Belfast University
has organized a free
online course to provide advanced knowledge of food safety and food
security across different levels of the food supply chain. Also, it is
mandatory to standardise the analytical skills: harmonisation and exploitation
of research and modern technologies are of primary importance to ensure the
integrity of European food. And the Food Integrity
project is an international effort to reach these purposes.
Lastly, Glenn Taylor, assistant head of Regulatory Services Hampshire County
Council, linked the past with the future: “it's also important to learn from
history, because adulterated stuffs are never written on food labelling”. In
fact, altered foods frequently have common nature: herbs, spices, drugs and
spirits are often involved in frauds. But looking at future, “we can't omit the
web commerce and the internet advertising”, added Taylor. Thus, in food frauds
it will be more and more important knowing the context and then asking the
right questions.
