Project title: Food Safety - Forming a European platform for protecting consumers against health risks
Contract no.: 515726
Start date of contract: 2004-08-01
Project Duration (in months): 48

Project summary

The primary objective is to establish a European platform for protecting consumers against health risks from the consumption of food through a co-ordination action ERA-NET of 15 Member States, 3 Associated Countries and 2 regional organisations representing 480 million European citizens. From each country, one representative from a public body responsible for financing or managing research activities on food safety issues carried out at national or regional level are appointed to the European Steering Committee (ESC), which will have overall responsibility for directing and managing the work. One representative with high standards of scientific excellence will be appointed to the European Expert Advisory Group (EEAG), providing scientific and technical support when requested by the ESC. The focus will be on:

Exchanging information on the management of programmes and evaluation practices aiming to define best practice and to develop harmonised transnational evaluation, management and analysis/communication procedures.

Identifying complementarities between topics in ongoing national or regional programmes and to define additional joint strategic topics.

Identifying a procedure or system to proactively describe new or re-emerging chemical and/or microbial risks in European food and feed production chains.

Clustering of projects and the exchange of information on research in overlapping or complementary areas, creating a durable integration with regard to the planning and conduct of research.

Defining the policy, scientific and industrial challenges within the selected strategic topics and to define new opportunities and gaps in the existing programmes.

Identifying barriers hindering transnational research co-operation, including the financing, monitoring and auditing of research activities.

Development of models leading to the launching of pilot common calls for proposals within the strategic topics to establish transnational research programmes.

External communication with consumer groups, industry, authorities and the scientific community to facilitate pan-European dissemination and exploitation of the results, including the development of common plans for evaluation, analysis, interpretation and communication of research outputs. Also to encourage the involvement of other eligible European organisations in future co-ordination activity.

In the four years project period it would be a tremendous achievement if all participants had established their own national Food Safety Research Programme with transnational activities included, that funding allocated to food safety research in Europe was used more efficiently and co-ordinated, and the links between consumers and producers had been strengthened through transnational consumer dialogue.