Food and trade experts come to campus to talk about the safety of imported food
Researchers from the CALS Food Research Institute joined others with a wide variety of expertise in the food business and international trade in May to talk about the highly visible issue of safety of imported foods. Participants from across the nation and abroad addressed food import safety from a variety of perspectives including systems analysis, infrastructure resilience, governance and policy analysis. This conference on Food Import Safety was organized by the UW-Madison Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy. The Food Research Institute was a co-sponsor. The conference began with plenary talks that looked at the origins of adulteration and contamination in rapidly developing economies such as China and examined import violations at port and land-borders. An industry panel addressed consumer opinion and supply chain management. Another panel discussed sampling schemes and testing and detection technology. European speakers discussed risk-based approaches from the European Food Safety Authority and European Commission to regulate safety in imported foods. Still another panel was chaired by a industry spokesman, included discussions of global approaches to food protection as well as different forms of governance.
The WAGE multi-disciplinary collaborative project committee responsible for this conference included: Lorna Zach (COE), Vicki Bier (COE), Steph Tai (Law), Peter Carstensen (Law), Chuck Czuprynski (FRI-CALS), Ellin Doyle (FRI-CALS), Jack Nevin (Business), Verda Blythe (Business), and Lydia Zepeda (Consumer Science). Sponsors included: Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE), Center for Freight and Infrastructure Research and Education (CFIRE), Engineering Professional Development (EPD), European Union Center of Excellence (EUCE), ISyE (Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering), and FRI (Food Research Institute), CIBER (Center for International Business Education and Research, The China Initiative, Center for Human Performance and Risk Analysis, College of Engineering.