Brochure - Food Safety, Everyone's Business: A Guide to World Food Safety Day 2019

The first-ever World Food Safety Day (WFSD) will be celebrated on 7 June 2019 to draw attention and inspire action to help prevent, detect and manage foodborne risks, contributing to food security, human health, economic prosperity, agriculture, market access, tourism, and sustainable development.

Safe food is critical to promoting health and ending hunger, two of the primary goals of the 2030 Agenda. There is no food security without food safety and in a world where the food supply chain has become more complex, any adverse food safety incident may have global negative effects on public health, trade and the economy.

Yet food safety is taken for granted. It is often invisible until you get food poisoning. Unsafe food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemical substances, causes more than 200 diseases – ranging from diarrhea to cancer.

This international day is an opportunity to strengthen efforts to ensure that the food we eat is safe. Whether you produce, process, sell or prepare food, then you have a role in keeping it safe. Everybody along the food chain is responsible for food safety. For this inaugural WFSD, all stakeholders are invited to raise global awareness about food safety in general and to highlight that everyone involved in food systems has a part to play.

This year WFSD reinforces the call to strengthen the commitment to scale up food safety made by the Addis Ababa Conference and the Geneva Forum under the umbrella of “The Future of Food Safety” in 2019.