By Codex Secretary Tom Heilandt

On 30 May 2020 7.22pm German time I was glued to my new quarantine TV watching the launch of the Space X DEMO-2 mission. I felt almost the same awe and excitement as I had in front of a much smaller black and white TV in 1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

I don’t remember what I was thinking in 1969 but now a lot of thoughts raced through my head: the first was selfish. It was: “Yes, I will live to go to space myself!”

My second thought was: “We would not be able achieve this if we didn’t have agriculture, if we didn’t have safe food available, if we didn’t have international cooperation, public-private partnerships, if we didn’t have standards and science”.

Safe food impossible without cooperation.

We all need safe food to be able to create and innovate in peaceful cooperation and make our big dreams a reality. And we all need to cooperate peacefully in order to be able to achieve our big dream of bringing safe and nutritious food to every home. A crisis like COVID-19 risks throwing us off course in many of our goals, and we can overcome the pandemic only if we work together on every level, individual households, neighborhoods, cities, regions and between countries.

Today is World Food Safety Day, a reminder that we need to cooperate to keep food safe because if it is not safe – it is not food. Happy World Food Safety Day! Food safety is everyones’ business.

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