Improving information sharing on national food safety legislation

Panelists from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) presented the FAOLEX database at a side event of the 40th Session of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, taking place this week in Geneva.

FAOLEX is a comprehensive and up-to-date legislative and policy database, one of the world's largest electronic collection of national laws, regulations and policies on food, agriculture and natural resources management.

Exchange of information is vital

Renata Clarke, Head of the FAO Food Safety and Quality Unit opened the session introducing its objectives: to increase knowledge and awareness of Codex delegates on FAOLEX; to discuss how to maximize its use; and to receive feedback on how delegates would like to see the database structured.

“Exchange of information is vital to Codex. In the framework of the Codex revitalization process, members decided to work more on information sharing relating to food safety and quality legislation, and to lean on FAOLEX for this”, she added.

FAO Development Law Service

Ilja Betlem, FAO Legal Officer, explained that in addition to in-house legal service support, FAO has created a Development Law service, providing technical assistance to governments in the review of laws at the national level on any matters related to food and agriculture. This – he added – originated from the FAO constitutional mandate to collect, analyze and disseminate information on food and agriculture. Information on domestic legislation is collected from FAO members and managed by the FAO Legal Office. This is now mainly channeled through the FAOLEX database.

A global public good

“FAOLEX is a global public good – with free, open and online access – fulfilling FAO’s core function to assemble, analyze, monitor and improve access to data and information, in areas related to FAO’s mandate” said Andrés Rubio, Development Law Branch at the FAO Legal Office, while recalling that FAOLEX has over 20 years of operation, with 140.000 legal and policy texts, weekly updates and 2.000 average daily users. He also recalled that 14.000 records relevant to food safety have been reviewed in view of improving the system’s user-friendliness.

Article XI of the FAO Constitution: 

1. All Member Nations and Associate Members shall communicate regularly to the Director-General, on publication, the texts of laws and regulations pertaining to matters within the competence of the Organization which the Director-General considers useful for the purposes of the Organization. 

2. With respect to the same matters, all Member Nations and Associate Members shall also communicate regularly to the Director-General statistical, technical and other information published or otherwise issued by, or readily available to, the government.[…]

Mary Kenny, Food Safety Officer at FAO, highlighted the importance of partnering with countries to update their information on the food safety platform on the Codex website. A demo of the platform, linking to the FAOLEX, was conducted by Roberto Sciotti, Record and Information Management Officer in the Codex Secretariat.

Kenny called on delegates to ensure that their legal information is comprehensive and up-to-date.

“The FAOLEX partnership between Codex and the FAO Legal Office will be a win-win with everyone’s commitment”, concluded Renata Clarke.

The FAOLEX Database is available here.

 

20/07/2017