Food Safety Crises Research Articles

Crises de Segurança do Alimento e a Demanda por Carnes no Brasil

Resumo: Investiga-se se crises de segurança do alimento deslocam para baixo as demandas por carne bovina, suína e de frango no Brasil. Constroem-se três séries de índices de crises de segurança do alimento, um para cada tipo de carne, somando-se o total de notícias na Folha de São Paulo que atenderam a critérios predefinidos de busca. Utilizam-se estas três séries, os preços das carnes e de um bem composto e o gasto per capita com consumo como variáveis explicativas em seis especificações alternativas de um sistema de quatro equações de demanda. Seleciona-se a melhor especificação do modelo por meio de testes ajustados de razão de verossimilhança. Testes com o modelo selecionado não rejeitam a hipótese de que as demandas não são afetadas por crises de segurança do alimento. Conclui-se que se deslocamentos da demanda para baixo em reação a crises de segurança do alimento criam incentivos para que as empresas adotem medidas para produzir um alimento mais seguro, tais incentivos não existem nos setores de carnes no Brasil. Assim, reforça-se a importância e necessidade de um sistema público ativo para regulamentar e estabelecer padrões de segurança da carne no Brasil.

Small is beautiful: firm size, prevention and food safety

Food safety crises have led governments to increase food firms’ responsibility by asking them to voluntarily implement prevention efforts. In this article, we explore the relationship between food firms’ size and their level of prevention efforts. We show that when cross-contamination between units is unlikely, small firms undertake greater prevention efforts than large firms. But when cross-contamination between units is possible, the effort-size curve is an inverted U-shape. Using these results, we discuss food safety laws in Europe and in the US, which differ in how they deal with the size of food firms’ operations.

Web Data Mining and Social Media Analysis for better Communication in Food Safety Crises

Although much effort is made to prevent risks arising from food, food-borne diseases are an ever present-threat to the consumers’ health. The consumption of fresh food that is contaminated with pathogens like fungi, viruses or bacteria can cause food poisoning that leads to severe health damages or even death. The outbreak of Shiga Toxin-producing enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) in Germany and neighbouring countries in 2011 has shown this dramatically. Nearly 4.000 people were reported of being affected and more than 50 people died during the so called EHEC-crisis. As a result the consumers’ trust in the safety of fruits and vegetables decreased sharply. In situations like that food crisis managers from public authorities as well as from privately owned companies must react quickly: They have to identify and track back contaminated products and they have to withdraw them from the market. At the same time they have to inform the stakeholders’ about potential threats and recent developments. This is a particularly challenging task because when an outbreak is just detected information about the actual scope is sparse and the demand for information is high. Thus, ineffective communication among crisis managers and towards the public can result in inefficient crisis management, health damages and a major loss of trust in the food system. This is why crisis communication is a crucial part of successful crisis management, whereas the quality of crisis communication largely depends on the availability of and the access to relevant information. In order to improve the availability of information, we have explored how information from public accessible internet sources like Twitter or Wikipedia can be harnessed for food crisis communication. In this paper we are going to report on some initial insight from a web mining and social media analysis approach to monitor health and food related issues that can develop into a potential crises. We have chosen Twitter and Wikipedia as sources for our study since it’s publicly accessible and reveal what people state about certain topics and what people are looking for in order to answer their questions.

식품산업체가 겪는 위기의 분류와 위기 수준 판단

Objectives: Food safety has become one of the major public-concerning issues in Korea. In order to set guidelines to create manuals for the response to a food safety crisis by food industry, this paper classified food safety crises and suggested techniques to determine crisis level. Methods: This study clarified common terminologies and definitions including in food safety crises. It reviewed various food safety crises and described characteristics, types, and states of crises. Results: The results of this study suggested that a food safety crisis implied a situation in which hazards/risk spreading in the food supply chain was widely described, causing strong public concern followed by a socioeconomic impact, and therefore, requiring the implementation of a prompt and full response regarding the situation. In terms of seeking response plans, food safety crises might be classified according to the penalties resulting from violations of laws and regulations, causative substances, stages of the food supply chain, and first contact point for incidents. The crisis level for a food safety crisis could be classified according to its severity parameters. The guideline matrix was divided into four major stages: Blue/guarded, Yellow/elevated, Orange/high, and Red/severe. This study also suggested several methods for determining the crisis level, such as the simple judgement method, scoring methods using a check-list and a weighted check-list. Conclusion: The severity of related parameters might be of great importance in understanding a crisis and determining response options/challenges for crisis levels.

Communicating Food Safety via the Social Media

This study examined the Chinese public’s use of Weibo (a microblog platform) and their cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to a series of food safety crises. Based on a sample of 1,360 adult Weibo users across China, the study found that Weibo use contributed to cognitive and behavioral responses to food safety concerns, but access to other online and off-line news and information outlets was largely irrelevant. Emotional response toward the food safety incidents was a stronger predictor of both food safety risk perception and prevention action, relative to food safety incident awareness and factual awareness. Theoretical and social implications of study findings are discussed.

Risk communication and social media during food safety crises: a study of stakeholders’ opinions in Ireland

Social media is a particular communication platform which has witnessed an exponential growth in use and influence in recent years, democratising the communication process, and offering risk communicators a way of putting into practice those principles which are advocated to be at the core of risk management and communication. However, little is known about stakeholders’ willingness to embrace this new form of communication in a food crisis. The current study presented an exploratory investigation of the opinions of Irish stakeholders on the position of risk communication in a crisis, with a particular focus on understanding what application social media may have. In-depth one-to-one interviews were carried out with key stakeholders holding frontline positions in managing and communicating about risk in the food sector in Ireland. The stakeholders identified risk communication as a central activity in a food safety crisis, driven by an obligation to protect both consumer health and the reputation of the Irish food sector. Stakeholders relied primarily on risk communication to disseminate information in a crisis so to educate and inform the public on a risk and to prevent confusion and alarmism; most did not explicitly value two-way risk communication in a crisis. The ability to effectively manage future crises may depend on stakeholders’ willingness to adapt to the changing communication landscape, namely – their willingness to adopt social media and use it effectively. The findings indicate that the stakeholders interviewed are appreciative of the need to engage with social media in times of a food safety crisis. However, most valued social media as a one-way channel to help spread a message and there was little reference to the interactive nature of this medium. Implications for integrating social media into crisis risk communication strategies are discussed.

Adapting to food safety crises: Interpreting success and failure in the Canadian response to BSE

This paper explores processes of adaptation to food safety crises, and raises questions about what can be understood as success and failure in a crisis response. It presents the outcomes of a qualitative research study of Canada’s beleaguered beef industry, and investigates institutional learning and adaptation following an outbreak of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in particular. The analysis is guided by a concern with tensions between stability and change in adaptation. It draws on conceptual research on risk and the construction of non-problematicity as a means of symmetrically investigating how risk responses to BSE both opened up and closed down reflexive scrutiny of food and food safety systems. Specific attention is paid to constraints on adaptation imposed by preoccupations with market-led regulation, scientific risk analysis and the maintenance of institutional relations in the face of a potential public controversy. The paper concludes that in order to contend with recurrent crises in modern food-safety systems it is necessary to widen adaptive strategies, and to scrutinise agricultural priorities and food policy as essential aspects of adaptation.

What can microblog exchanges tell us about food safety crises in China?

The affordance of microblogging services has made them an ideal tool for communicating risk and crisis. However, research on social media and risk communication is still in its infancy. This study, following the uses and gratifications framework, attempts to give some insight into the way micro-bloggers communicate about risk by investigating food safety communications on the microblogging service in China. A content analysis was conducted on 6186 microblog posts relating to 12 recent food safety incidents in China. A series of bivariate chi-square tests was conducted to test the association between micro-bloggers and gratifications. The results indicate that different types of micro-bloggers gratify different needs. Compared to other types of micro-bloggers, the general public tends to use microblogging to express opinions on food safety incidents, regulation and/or policy, rather than simply disseminating information; members of the public enjoy fewer multimedia affordances in their microblog posting but express more negative feelings. Although we anticipate growth in the use of social media in environmental health communication, caution is still needed: communication in China still follows a traditional top-down pattern.

Coping with uncertainty in public health: the use of heuristics

The observation that experts and lay people use cognitive shortcuts or heuristics to arrive at judgements about complex problems is certainly not new. But what is new is the finding that a group of reasoning strategies, which have been maligned by philosophers and logicians alike, have demonstrable value in helping members of the public come to a judgement about public health problems. These problems, which span food safety crises, immunization scares and risks associated with exposure to environmental toxins, presuppose knowledge and expertise which falls outside of the epistemic and technical competence of most members of the public. Notwithstanding the complexity of these problems, they are not perceived by lay people to be wholly unintelligible or incomprehensible. This short communication reports on the findings of a questionnaire-based investigation into the use of these reasoning strategies by 879 members of the public. The results reveal a rational competence on the part of lay people which has been hitherto unexamined, and which may be usefully exploited in all aspects of public health work.

Analyzing consumers' preferences towards GM food in southern Spain

In Europe, since the 1990s, food safety crises have heightened public concerns about and distrust towards the agro-food sector, making consumers wary of genetically modified (GM) foods. The application of gene technology to agricultural production has become a highly controversial scientific, political and social issue due to the uncertainty about the potential risks and benefits from GM food consumption. In this regard, public views influence consumers' demands and hence determine the future of this technology's development. Biotechnology proponents attribute the current consumer resistance to GM foods to the lack of tangible benefits for the consumers with higher functional properties. Thus, this paper estimates consumers' preferences regarding GM foods by simulating a market for GM functional cornflakes in southern Spain using the conjoint analysis method. Additionally, market segmentation was performed using a cluster analysis and the consumers' profile differences for each segment were identified. The main results indicate that consumers prefer the GM-free food; nonetheless, the market segmentation distinguishes a potential market niche for GM foods and indicates that businesses can develop strategies to target these segments. Therefore, the marketing strategies implemented in southern Spain should be focused on the health functional claims of second generation GM food.

Regionalizing food security? Imperatives, intersections and contestations in a post-9/11 world

In the early 21st century, food security has become an urgent public concern, arguably more entangled with social, political and environmental problems at multiple scales now than in the past. This paper examines approaches to food system change emphasizing regionalization, rather than either localization or globalization, to consider framings of food security. An enlarged food security risk frame—one that starts with food safety crises and the threat of agrifood terrorism but also recognizes new, more diffuse threats to food availability likely with global environmental change, provides common ground now for diverse institutional interest in regional food systems models. Combining discursive approaches to food security with territorial and relational conceptualizations of the region and regionalization, the paper develops a comparative analysis of three emerging regionalization initiatives in the United States: 1) work by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (a civil society organization); 2) the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative; and 3) the Walmart Corporation's Heritage Agriculture initiative. It finds that institutions with markedly different histories, interests and power can align with a widening, ascendant food security risk frame. However, their approaches to regionalization reflect varying combinations of territorial and relational priorities, and suggest uneven implications for other food security concerns, such as community and food access.

The Administrative Ordering of Nature and Society – Precaution and Food Safety at the Molecular and Global Levels

Responding to public fears and the loss of confidence in the aftermath of several food safety crises in the 1990s and 2000s, more and more regulatory laws have increasingly been affected by the precautionary principle. To clarify how those developments can have adverse consequences, we discuss two very different cases. First, at the molecular level we discuss the problems the system encounters by strictly applying the linear no-threshold (LNT) at low doses model, which was adopted in response to fears about the effects of ionizing radiations. Second, at a global scale, we discuss the problems associated with the precautionary regulation on Illegal, Unreported and Unregistered Fisheries that came into effect January 1, 2010. The technical aspects of food safety testing and their impacts are perhaps unknown to policy makers but they do dominate safety decisions. Both examples show that strict application of the precautionary principle produce deleterious side effects, which go against the very policy values that the precautionary regulation should protect. We show, in particular, that overly precautionary food safety regulation may harm food security. We conclude in the EU and other Western nations, problems of food security are much more relevant to human health and life expectancy than food safety. We recommend that current food safety regulation based on the precautionary risk-regulation reflex should normatively be re-evaluated with a complete regard for the values of food security – both within and outside the EU.

Information asymmetry and traceability incentives for food safety

We define traceability by its precision that is the probability of finding the source of a problem. We consider a downstream food processor firm (principal) that sets traceability precision and contingent payments so to induce homogeneous upstream suppliers (agents) to exert the principal's preferred level of food safety effort. We focus on cases in which food safety crises originate from defects in raw material provided by upstream firms to analytically show that high precision can substitute for high intensive contingent payments and vice-versa, and thus traceability is not an unequivocal signal for safer food. Contrary to previous results in the literature, we also show that government regulation based on mandatory traceability with sanctions may not necessarily lead to safer food, while increasing the food processor's costs. Finally, we use our analytical results to give managerial feedbacks for firms adopting and considering traceability.

Industry Challenge to Best Practice Risk Communication

Effective food safety and food defense risk communication helps to inform consumers without causing panic and alarm. The Risk Communication Team of the Natl. Center for Food Protection and Defense has developed a list of 11 best practices recommended for effective risk communication. These practices, designed for a food defense crisis, are currently applied to food safety issues, since fortunately a food defense crisis has yet to occur. IFT examined the utility of these best practices and the limitations on their use during food safety and food defense crises by academics, trade associations, and the government. It was hypothesized that legal and business considerations as well as the nature of the event would determine the implementation of the best practices. Through the use of focus group meetings, it was discovered that there was a low level of awareness of the best practices. However, stakeholders practiced some aspects of the recommended practices. Participants felt some of the practices were related and could be consolidated. They also agreed that a food defense event will increase the urgency of the communication and include players not typically involved in food safety issues. The challenges reported by the stakeholders varied, but legal liability, as well as the impact their communications could have on an industry, were often cited. From the government perspective, their need to act within their authorities drove some of their actions with respect to communication. Determining the differences in communication limitations during food safety against food defense events can provide key information to further developing and refining risk communications and specific messages targeted for a food defense incident. Effective food safety and food defense risk communication helps to inform consumers without causing panic and alarm. Determining the differences in communication limitations during food safety against food defense events can provide key information to further developing and refining risk communications and specific messages targeted for a food defense incident.

Quality standard labeling information on meat packs demanded by consumers and relationships with purchasing motives

Worldwide, food-safety crises debates have come forward as an important aspect and apart from all debated food items, meat is accounted at top. Hence, a study was conducted to identify public awareness and adoption toward food certification standards and the factors that associate to Halal, SLS, ISO and HACCP purchase intention of meat. Purposive sampling approach was adopted and data were collected from 100 consumers who purchase meat products for their consumption through pre-tested structured questionnaire by personnel interview. The model explained R²= 0.69 and R²= 0.61 of the variability in awareness and adoption, respectively about the factors motivate consumers toward food certificate logo on meat packs. Around 80%, 46% and 30% of respondents have recorded as high awareness group with regard to SLS, ISO and HACCP standards respectively. Despite that utility of same information always or sometime on purchasing decision reported as low level. A significant relationship was observed for knowledge and utilizes logo of SLS, ISO, Halal and HACCP with socio demographic profiles including religion, gender, net income, education, occupation, interpersonal and mass media. Key words: Certificate standards; Meat packs; Awareness; Adoption DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4038/jas.v6i2.3863 The Journal of Agricultural Sciences , 2011, vol .6, no 2, pp85-90

A methodology for controlling dispersion in food production and distribution

After a number of food safety crises, the design and implementation of traceability systems became an important tool for managing safety risks in the food industry. In the literature, numerous studies deal with traceability from the viewpoint of information system and technology development. However, traceability and its implications for food safety receive less attention in literature on production and distribution planning. From the viewpoint of operations management, an efficient management of food safety risks requires the consideration of the amounts of potentially recalled products, affected regions/customers, and logistics efforts connected to solving the safety problem. In this paper we are developing a production and distribution planning model for food supply chains to address these issues. We also present heuristics for solving the resulting mixed-integer linear programming model and demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed methodology in a numerical investigation.

FOOD SAFETY GAMBIT

FIRST, animals eating pet food contaminated with melamine got sick in 2007. Then the next year, hundreds of thousands of babies in China drinking milk tainted by the plastics and fertilizer ingredient fell ill, and six died. When scientists in industry, regulatory agencies, and academia started searching for melamine where nobody had looked for it before, it took just under a month to develop the first analytical methods to detect it. Now, instrument maker Thermo Fisher Scientific aims to do better. In April, the U.S. company opened a research lab just outside Frankfurt charged with developing analytical techniques for emerging food crises within “one to two weeks,” said Klaus Mittendorf, the Food Safety Response Center’s manager. Officially, the center’s mission is to “rapidly mobilize during widespread, chemical-contamination-based food safety crises to help government institutions, independent labs, and food companies isolate and control the contamination.” The lab is something of an experiment. “We ar...

FOOD SAFETY CRISIS MANAGEMENT PLAN IN HONG KONG

ABSTRACT Successive food safety crises in Hong Kong not only have trapped the local public in panic, but also raised the alarm in the public health system's crises preparedness for food safety problems. Although the Office of Crisis Management of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Crisis Management Academy and the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed in European countries have been established for coordinating emergency and crisis response activities on food safety issues, there is inadequate emergency and crises management of food safety by the local food authorities. This article aimed to formulate a local food safety crisis management plan which consists of preventive phase, emergency phase and reconstruction phase based on the revised crisis preparedness model. It was suggested that a cross‐boundary liaison with health authorities overseas, a close inter‐ and intradepartmental cooperation in the government, a balance between economic and political issues, considerations on public culture, and an introduction of education for food safety and morality should be the determinants of success in the plan. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONSCrisis preparedness on food safety seems to be the indispensable proactive measure to safeguard the public health by the local food authorities. This article aimed to discuss the formulation of a local crisis management plan on contingent food safety problems in preventive phase, emergency phase and reconstruction phase based on the revised crisis preparedness model (Elsubbaugh et al. 2004). This food safety crisis management plan not only can safeguard the public health but also regain the confidence on food safety from the local public and stakeholders. Although further improvement can be made, the proposed plan is worthwhile because no similar planning for food safety crisis management has been found in the local food authorities. It also provides a stepping stone for the future development of food safety crisis management to the local policy makers in the public health sector.

Multilevel Food Safety Governance and Its Discontents

What's the Beef? The Contested Governance of European Food Safety. Edited by Christopher Ansell, David Vogel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 400 pp., $67.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-262-01225-1), $27.00 paper (ISBN: 0-262-51192-4). What's the Beef , by Christopher Ansell and David Vogel, is a book about policy analysis. It explores the contested governance that has resulted from the multilevel and multiactor regulation of food safety within the European Union. Ansell and Vogel see contested governance as a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of existing institutional arrangements within the European Union. The contributions to this edited volume focus on explaining how contested governance arises and on assessing whether recent reforms of European food safety governance will lessen the level of contestation. The main thesis of What's the Beef is twofold. First, Ansell and Vogel maintain that European food safety governance has become especially contested as a result of several food safety crises (most notably Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy , or Mad Cow Disease), European integration, and international trade liberalization. Their main qualms with multilevel governance stem from its comparatively weak institutionalization and the multiple conflicts that such governance engenders. These weaknesses arise because (1) European or international regulation interferes with the different cultural preferences and institutional logics of European states; (2) there exists a lack of trust in postnational institutions; (3) organized interests have numerous access points into policymaking as a direct result of multilevel governance; and (4) the institutions of multilevel governance have precarious legitimacy. Other contributors emphasize what can be considered subsidiary explanations—such as conflicts resulting from changes in agricultural production, disagreements over the appropriate basis for regulatory decision making in the face of substantial risks, and differences in the perceptions of the risks involved. Second, Ansell and Vogel also argue that, when contested governance arises, it creates a window of opportunity for reform efforts that are designed to restore trust and legitimacy. The main trends they identify in this regard are (1) the removal of health protection from the control of …

Food safety in a globalizing world: opportunities and challenges for India

AbstractRising incomes and urbanization, increasing consumer awareness prompted by widely publicized food safety crises, and an expansion in agricultural exports have been important drivers for the increased attention to food safety in India. But the development of effective food safety systems is hampered by a number of factors: restrictive government marketing regulations, a weak policy and regulatory framework for food safety, inadequate enforcement of existing standards, poor market infrastructure and agricultural support services, and the predominance of small farms. Addressing food safety concerns in India is likely to require adoption of appropriate legislation; strengthening capacity to enforce rules; promoting adoption of good agricultural, manufacturing, and hygiene practices; greater collective action; and some targeted investments. Joint efforts by the government and the private sector are needed to implement these actions.