International Food Summit to begin on Apr 10

New Delhi, Apr 8 (UNI) Senior experts from leading international food regulatory bodies will participate in a two-day 'International Food Regulatory' Summit to be held here on April 10-11.

The summit will emphasis on the recently enacted Food Safety and Standards Act, which provides an opportunity to revisit the current food regulatory regime to ensure that the consumers get high-quality and safe food as well as enable a faster growth of the domestic food industry.

The participants will include the Chief, Food Quality and Standards Service, Food and Nutrition Division and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.

Besides, two Vice Chairpersons of the Codex Alimentarius Commission and senior representatives from different country regulatory authorities such as Brazil, Europe, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, the UK and US will also be present.

Several senior authorities from different ministries of the Government of India and Food Regulatory, Quality and Safety experts are also slated to participate in the summit.

The event will be organised by industry body CII.

The Indian Food sector is estimated to be worth over 200 billion dollars and is expected to grow to 310 billion dollars by 2015.

It also contributes to a major part of the retail basket. The food retail sector is also growing at a hefty 9 per cent.

As the food business is growing beyond borders in the new WTO regime, nations are replacing their tariff barriers with more complicated non tariff barriers and quality and safety considerations have acquired centre stage with an ascending importance of the role of standards and conformity assessment.

The International Summit is being organised in this context with the objectives of building a common ground in India for food regulations by the participation of all stakeholders concerned and specifically leveraging the learnings from some other regulatory regimes.

UNI