OPENING
REMARKS
Dr C.N.
Mwikisa
Director, Division of Healthy Environments and Sustainable Development
WHO Regional Office for Africa
Your Excellency, President of the Republic of
Zimbabwe,
Honourable Ministers,
Assistant Director-General of FAO,
Excellencies, Members of the Diplomatic Corps
accredited to Zimbabwe,
Distinguished Guests and Participants,
Fellow Colleagues from FAO and WHO,
Ladies and gentlemen,
I welcome you all on behalf of the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr Lee Jong-wook and on behalf of Dr Luis Gomez Sambo, the Regional Director, to the First Regional Conference on Food Safety for Africa, organized jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization.
Permit me to use this occasion to thank Your Excellency, and the Government and friendly people of Zimbabwe for having accepted to host the First Conference on Food Safety for Africa. Mr President we are most grateful. May I say on behalf of WHO/FAO and the participants at this forum that the preparations made by Zimbabwe have been excellent?
Excellencies
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
Food is a source of energy and nutrition and also contributes to our general well-being. Food acts nevertheless as a vehicle for the transmission of a variety of disease causing agents such as bacteria, parasites, viruses, fungal toxins and pesticides. The burden of all food-borne diseases is difficult to estimate but is likely to be significant. The incidence of diarrhoea diseases caused by consumption of contaminated food and water is estimated at 3.3 to 4.1 episodes per child per year, is indicative of the problem. The total mortality due to diarrhoea is around 700,000 for all age groups in Africa. Several devastating outbreaks of food-borne diseases such as cholera, salmonellosis, entero-haemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC), hepatitis A and acute aflatoxicosis have occurred in a number of African countries recently. For example, outbreaks of cholera in 2004 in 28 countries resulted in 85,807 cases and 2,221 deaths. In 2005, reports from 30 countries indicated that so far 33,934 cases and 1,161 deaths have occurred. During the 2004, an outbreak of acute aflatoxicosis, in Kenya reported 317 cases and 125 deaths. Another outbreak reported a further 74 reported cases and 28 deaths in 2005. We should remind ourselves that the outbreak cases only shows us the tip of the iceberg and many more sporadic cases go unrecorded.
It is also noteworthy that, in addition to death and ill health, food-borne diseases have profound economic consequences. The economic cost in food replacement during the 2004 outbreak of acute aflatoxicosis in Kenya was 166,000 metric tonnes of safe food for 1.8 million people over six months. In 1990, the Food and Drug Administration of Nigeria destroyed aflatoxin-contaminated food worth more than US$ 200,000. In 1997, a ban imposed on Ugandan fish exports to the European Union markets that resulted in losses amounting to US$36.9 million. A cholera outbreak in Tanzania in 1998 cost about US$36 million in lost revenue.
Some Member States have good infrastructure for food safety activities but most countries share similar health related characteristics, namely: poverty, poor environmental hygiene and sanitation, poor public health funding and inadequate disease surveillance. Civil strife, border conflicts, population displacement, droughts, floods and weak communication and information systems also compound the problem. Member States are urged to aspire to ameliorate these factors and build efficient integrated food safety systems covering the entire food chain. These systems must be developed in close collaboration between the health and the food production/agriculture sectors.
In recent years, African consumers are seeing changes in the way food is produced and processed that impact on safety. For example, there is a shift from eating home-prepared food to consumption of ready-to-eat foods, which are often sold as street foods in many countries. Street food vendors provide essential service to workers, shoppers, travellers, school children and people on low incomes. The hygiene aspects of vending operations are a major source of concern for food control officers as street vended foods are often associated with frequent food poisoning.
Food insecurity is also pervasive, making it critically important that we use the resources at our disposal effectively and efficiently. Food being a scarce resource requires special attention to ensure that the little that is available is safe for human consumption. In many African countries, food still continues to be produced on subsistence basis. As a result, Africa imports about 60% of its food supply. This presents huge challenges, as it is especially difficult to monitor the safety of food grown and processed abroad.
Globally, there is a paradigm shift, which will no longer only consider food as an agricultural/trade commodity but also as a public health issue. At the international level, the 1992 FAO/WHO International Conference on Nutrition recognized that ‘access to nutritionally adequate and safe food as a right of each individual’. As a basic human right, food safety was endorsed by the World Health Assembly in May 2000 and accepted by all Ministries of Health as an essential public health function. WHO in consultation with its Member States developed a Global Strategy for Food Safety, which provides guidance to WHO and countries' activity in this area. At the regional level, Resolution AFR/RC53/R5 endorsed by the WHO Regional Committee for Africa in 2003 urged the Regional Director and Member States to strive to improve food safety programs in order to assure the safety of the food of the people in the region.
Despite this and the dramatic changes in the market place, the regulatory tools available to Member States to prevent food poisoning have changed minimally. One area of oversight that needs improving is food-borne disease surveillance and food monitoring. WHO is supporting Member States in food-borne diseases surveillance through the Global Salmonella Surveillance Program (Global Salm surv). WHO will continue to build capacity and strengthen Public Health Laboratories to enable them carry out these activities effectively and efficiently as components of Regional and National Integrated Disease Surveillance. Member States are encouraged to maintain comprehensive and up-to-date inventory of trends in food-borne diseases including outbreaks to inform decision-making and risk management.
WHO will continue to provide support for the revision of food laws and legislation, implementation of Codex standards, effective participation in the work of Codex Alimentarius and preparation of national action plans. Our programmes will in particular focus on consumer education by reaching out to schools, hospitals, and market places as well as by working closely with civil society.
Making food safe will not only protect the health of the consumer but will also produce a healthy work force and increase food exports. It will thus contribute significantly to activities aimed at poverty alleviation (MDG 1) as well as reducing child mortality (MDG 4). We will work with Member States and our partners on micro-projects, aimed at improving the safety of food from all producers and processors, in the hope that this will improve the economic status of the people and thus contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals including also MDG8: developing a global partnership for development, which will have to be based on increased food export from our countries to richer parts of the world.
Excellencies,
Distinguished Participants and Guests,
To conclude I wish to reiterate our optimism despite the numerous food safety challenges in Africa. At WHO we remain convinced that with increased dialogue, harnessed energies of various actors, cooperation and focused efforts at all levels as well as increased resources, we can collectively improve the safety of the food of the people in Africa. Our vision is very clear and we strongly believe we have the discipline to achieve it.
Thank you very much.
