Food security, food safety and climate changes

Access to sufficient safe food is a basic requirement for human health. Ensuring food safety and security in a highly globalized world presents increasingly difficult, and often under-appreciated challenges, for governments, commercial organizations and individuals alike. Food security is undoubtedly amongst the most pressing of challenges confronting the world in the twenty-first century. The FAO definition (1996) highlights the importance of ensuring that all people have access to safe, nutritious, preferred food, rather than simply ensuring that sufficient food is produced. A large part of food security is assuring the food is safe from a chemical, physical or biological aspect. According to UN, access to a safe and secure food supply is a basic human right. Everyone needs food and needs it every day either plant sources or animal sources or both. Food safety must be an integral part in the nutrition and food security policies and programs. Food safety and food security are interrelated concepts which have an impact on the health outcomes and quality of human lives. A key challenge to scale up nutrition, public health and food security/food safety globally is to better leverage existing capacity and research working towards evidence-based decisions. Food safety deals with safeguarding the own national food supply chain from the introduction, growth or survival of hazardous microbial and chemical agents. Food safety and food security (food availability) are essential goals that need to be met to protect and improve human health and nutrition.BG; bg; EFSAfocalpoint@mzh.government.b