Interview with Catherine Bessy - Senior FAO Food Safety Officer

Catherine Bessy recounts how her childhood eating in her grandmother’s Paris kitchen and working the summers on her family’s farm gave her an early exposure to the importance of healthy food and planted the seeds of a career in which she has sought to improve food safety around the globe through good governance and smart policy.

Interviewer: Today we are sitting down with Catherine Bessy, Senior Officer at FAO and really the mind behind the EU project “Strengthening of Capacities and Governance in Food and Phytosanitary Control”. 

Catherine, thanks for meeting with me today. Before delving into the project, I want to hear a little bit about your personal journey and what led you here today. Can you tell us where you grew up?

Catherine Bessy: I grew up in Paris but I am half French and half Swiss. I lead a very typical city girl life, going to a big French school. But I spent my summers in a completely different cultural context, working at my grandfather’s farm. We grew a mix of cereals, fruit trees, there were cows and a few pigs. My mother had emigrated to Paris from Switzerland, so spending our summers there was her way of catching up with her family.

Interviewer: Do you think it was your time spent on the farm that lead you to the work in food that you are doing today?

Catherine Bessy: my connection with food came from the French side of my family. My French grandmother was an incredible cook. The kind that doesn’t necessarily need to weigh each and every ingredient but that is able to cook something delicious with whatever is in the fridge. She was also the type of person who was very welcoming. At her house, there was always a seat at the table. I think that is where my view of food comes from, as something to be shared, something simple, genuine, that is also rooted in a cultural context. We ate food that was typically French, local and seasonal. The Swiss side of the family on the other hand, was very important for my educational background. I'm an engineer agronomist by training but it was in Switzerland that I acquired that relationship with the soil and the earth and the animals and, plants and fruits. I mean, my grandfather was even distilling alcohol from his fruits (at that time it was still allowed!)

Interviewer: So how did you get into food safety specifically?

Catherine Bessy: I studied agronomics and then I went into food science. At that time – it was the early nineties - it was the peak time when the European Union introduced HACCP requirements in food business. And so it was a natural path for a young graduate to get a job in the private sector and develop HACCP plans setting up food safety management systems. But then I moved on to work with the International Committee of the Red Cross in countries affected by wars and that is where I came in touch with food security issues. It was here that I realized that a lot of the conflicts could have been avoided or maybe managed differently had those countries had better governance, governance frameworks, and a much better distribution of wealth and better livelihoods altogether. I began thinking that working on the development side rather than on the emergency side could allow me to contribute to the avoidance of some of those conflicts and emergencies.

Interviewer: I see. So let’s talk about the project. Can you walk us through the process of how you came up with the design and the Food Control System Assessment Tool that is at the basis of the project?

Catherine Bessy:  The development of the tool is very closely related to the project. Since my early days at FAO, 26 years ago, I became involved in assessments of national food control systems, first supporting them, then managing them, and then supervising them from a methodology and continuous improvement perspective. Over the years, there were a growing number of efforts to harmonize legislations on a regional basis. Then in 2005-2006 Codex began its work to gather principles and guidelines for food control systems, which I was very involved in. In this context, we realized, together with my Codex colleagues, the need for a valid tool that could assess countries’ capacities with regard to their national food control system, using Codex guidelines, so once these were adopted we began our work developing the tool. It started as a FAO effort but we were soon joined by colleagues from WHO and a number of countries that were interested as well. It was a real journey. Finally, in 2019, after pilot testing it in nine countries, we published the tool. We published a further booklet on this in 2021 to help the user navigate the tool’s competencies and highlight their interlinkages and systemic connections.

Interviewer: So whom did you need to convince to make this happen?

Catherine Bessy: I knew from the beginning that I needed to lay the groundwork in order to convince the others. At the time, there weren’t so many other colleagues that were interested in, you know, a structured, systematic approach- it just sounded unnecessarily complex with regard to the internal guidelines that we had used so far. I knew that only once the foundations were created could I expect others to understand what it was all about and join.

Interviewer: Well, you obviously believed in this from the beginning.

Catherine Bessy : Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I am quite resilient. It was a super interesting journey.

Interviewer So moving onto the project, how did you get to the EU funded project?

Catherine Bessy: The European Union Commissionbecame interested in the assessments well before the tool was published in 2019. They are also providing a lot of support to the African Union, towards the construction of a continental vision and a one market in the African Continental Free Trade Area and the SPS. The EU realized that a good way to start in that direction was to assess where countries stand. The development of our tool came at the right time. There was a real need when they contacted me to provide technical support for the implementation of those assessments. The unique value that this tool offers is that it is designed along fundamental principles that are applicable to all, but its implementation process makes it possible for each country to capture their unique challenges, assets and priorities.

Interviewer: Can you tell me what you heard from the African Union or from the individual countries themselves, how were they involved in this process?

Catherine Bessy: We were contacted as implementing partners by the European Union because of our expertise in implementing these assessments, and the longstanding relationship that we have with the countries through our food safety capacity development programmes. From the first day it was always completely clear that we would be supporting the vision of the African Union’s SPS policy framework. Everything that we do for the project we are actually doing for the African Union and the African Union has been front and center of our discussions with the European Union. What we are doing is providing technical assistance to implement a structured, comprehensive and rigorous process for countries to come up with their own priorities. It's not me coming up with my ideas about their priorities. In other words, we are making sure that they are coming to the conclusions on their own/by themselves that really represent their concerns and that all stakeholders are part of the conversation.

Interviewer: Is there anything in hindsight that you would change in the design of the project?

Catherine Bessy: The commitment to have everyone included and engaged in the process takes a lot of time and patience. In hindsight, we probably should have accounted more generously for the amount of time that it takes to get all the countries on board. Let’s not forget, we are engaging 11 countries, and some of these undergo two assessments, one on the phytosanitary capacities and the other one on the food control system. It’s a big commitment and the governments are expected to contribute a lot in the assessment processes. So it’s the engagement phase which I think is so important, and that takes always a little bit more time than what you could expect. This iswhy we are requesting a slight extension of the project so that, we can really end up with meaningful results in all countries.

Interviewer: How can this project reach even greater heights?

Catherine Bessy: We decided to focus on this set of 11 countries because they had given tangible demonstration of their strong interest in these issues. It would be wonderful if these countries can become champions for our approach within the African continent and advance the vision of a continental free trade area leading the way for other African countries to follow the same path and create a truly continental trade area. If they can become models within and beyond the borders of Africa and we can have a greater number of countries be part of this network, then I think it can be fruitful both for regional trade and, of course, for international trade as well.

Interviewer: And would the tool itself improve and evolve?

Catherine Bessy: Certainly. We will continue to learn through those experiences. Food control is a living matter, it evolves with world circumstances, with trends in food production and food trade, with the food supply chains and the issues that are being raised here and there. It is important that our tool evolves also with the rules that are being set up at international level. Some types of risks are now more prominent than they were in the past. For example, there is a growing attention given to fraud. We need to make sure that the tool remains up to date, improving its range of indicators, and that we continue to train more assessors, expanding the skillset and the capacities in the countries. This will ensure that the tool and process remain relevant in the future.