PETER

Context

European consumers remember food safety and health crises encountered in the past (BSE, foot and mouth disease, Listeria, dioxin, growth hormone contaminated by Creutzfeld-Jacob prions, etc). In parallel, the demand for high quality food and feed products is increasing, as exemplified by the general growth of high quality products (e.g.; protected designation of origin) resulting in an increase in the number of such products and their growing market volume.

As a result of such food and feed safety concerns and quality requests, food and feed traceability and labelling and related analytical methods are becoming more and more important within the European Union. After a period of case-by-case regulation and European directives and research programmes (e.g. with the 258/97 regulation on novel foods and ingredients) the EU attempted to fill in the gaps between the several disparate directives and regulations by the publication of the general food law 178/02 regulation that entered in force in January 2005. As usual in this case, there is a large gap between a regulatory request and its practical implementation, particularly for SMEs.

Concomitantly the number of research programmes on the traceability and labelling in the EU increased. But such programmes are operating in a disparate manner due to a reliance on the annual budgets and the lack of cooperation between scientists in different research fields. Globally, due to differing timescales, different scientific focus and/or commodity driven programmes, there is a real danger that work will be carried out in isolation, resulting in duplication of effort with concomitant waste of resource. For example, traceability and decision support systems are being developed to differing degrees in several projects so a degree of harmonisation and/or cross fertilisation of approach is required to ensure the developed systems are comparable to ensure global traceability goals can be realised.

Because of this lack of integration, the scientists of the PETER consortium launched a programme able to develop and provide the EU with a complete and workable overview all European traceability measures and programmes.

Objectives

Expected results

• Identification of all the possible innovative and pragmatic solutions to training that could be implemented to promote traceability tools and concepts.
• Identification of methodologies, protocols and research results from all the participating projects, in order to define global guidelines of traceability and analyse best practices.
• Identification of constraints linked to management and monitoring of IT infrastructures in order to facilitate online access to documentation, geospatial and non-spatial traceability data.
• Identification of focus groups targeted by PETER for dissemination in Europe and INCO countries : including scientific community, different stakeholders of food chain, regulatory authorities and the SME community. Identify options for information dissemination inside and outside Europe.
• Production of a a document to address the EC, DG SANCO and DG Agri, listing the main unresolved issues in traceability and accompanying analytical methodologies

Contribution

• Provision of the other projects the results on the definition of the geotraceability concept in order to lead to a better integration of the geographic information into the traceability data management systems.
• Analysis of standardisation with respect to thematic data modelling and Spatial Information Reference Systems (SIRS).
• Cooperation with other traceability projects to identify existing standards related to the agro-food sectors associated to the different projects.
• Analysis of the characteristics of the IT infrastructures of other traceability projects in order to identify constraints linked to management and monitoring systems and to facilitate online access to documentation, geospatial and non-spatial traceability data.

Partners

CRAW off coordinator

Funding

• Sixth Framework Program - SSA