 We want to, more minutes, we are going to wait to see, to celebrate the world food safety day, and to mark this day, we are launching a report that is very relevant to the topic of the day, where we are commissioned by the International Livestock Research Institute, where we are looking into the current state and future directions of food safety in informal markets in low-emitting countries. My name is Sylvia Alonso. I'm a principal scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute, and I'll be your MC today. So, before getting started, let me give you some housekeeping rules for today. Feel free to use the chat to interact, to exchange, to comment, and to share with us. And maybe the first thing you can do is in the chat, please write your name in the institution that you represent. Use the Q&A, that is a Q&A icon, where you can put any questions you may have for the panelists. We will have some time, hopefully, at the end of the panel to take on some of those questions. The participants in the webinar will have also a chance and will be monitoring the Q&A and responding to the questions as we go along, and we'll try to answer as many questions as possible, also after the event and sharing them with registered participants. If you cannot hear or see, please close the Zoom and sign in again to the meeting that solved the problem. Also, please be aware that the session is being recorded, and all the audio, video, and chat are keeping archived, and that includes all the private messages you may exchange in the chat. Good, so with that, let me just take you through the program. We are going to spend the next one and a half hours talking about this report. We'll have some opening remarks to launch the event. Then we'll have the report authors telling us about the content of the report, what is relevant about it, what are the findings, and what are those directions and recommendations that they have found in relation to fighting food safety in informal markets. After that, we are also going to illustrate some of those recommendations and findings in the report with actual research findings from research work that we've been conducting at ILRI over the past two decades on looking at interventions that can really improve food safety in informal markets in low-middle income countries. Then we will have about 40 minutes of a panel. We'll hear from people from different institutions who want to know how this report resonates with their organizations, with their work on food safety, and what are the takeaways from the report. At the very end, we'll have closing remarks from ILRI. Before we get into that, I'd like to open the floor to the opening remarks. I'd like to invite Apollina Geekan, Director-General of the International Livestock Research Institute. Apollina, over to you. Colleagues, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, depending on which part of the world you're connecting from. I'm sending you greetings from ILRI, but I'm physically sitting here in Montpellier, the CGIR office here, where we have, we've just started the retreat of the AgriFood Resilient, the Resilient AgriFood Systems Science Area. So this is an indication that we need as ILRI, but we also bring the whole CGIR constituency behind us. I want to first of all thank all my ILRI colleagues and the range of partners who have made food safety an important body of our work for the past three decades. And let me also use the opportunity to thank the World Bank for joining us to do this. This is not the only thing that we've done together. We've done many things, but on this one, I'm delighted to be sitting on this chair here and thanking you as a previous ILRI employee. I witness many of the things that the institution did with the World Bank and personally taking this role and committed that we can build on that strong foundation to do even more. And we are here celebrating the World Food Safety Day, but really I want us to celebrate the great work that we've done, you know, in trying to address some of these issues here. And this comes through some of the work that has taken place through the agriculture for nutrition and health, the consortium research program that Delia was strongly involved and the ongoing One Health program that is involved. And these two very talented colleagues represent a much bigger community within ILRI and the range of partners trying to do this. So what are the numbers when it comes to food safety? About 600 million people are affected. They're not sure whether the food that they receive on the table is safe or consumption. But as you know, many have to eat it, whether they are sure or not, they must eat it. It's really for us now to ensure that we have the incentive, the solutions for people who really have no other options to actually have access to food safe for their consumption. Unfortunately, and very regrettably, up to half a million people still die every year in low and middle income countries for causes associated with food safety. And we're here demonstrating that at least we can move the needle to some extent. The overall cost is about 115 billion per year, economic cost, which is really remarkable. Imagine if we were to remove only half or best three quarters of this impact from our economic burden. I think a lot of that savings can help people to actually enjoy very good lives. And I think a lot of that falls within our hands. And we're starting from a very strong foundation based on the work that has been done in the past. What has ILRI done? As I mentioned, many of the colleagues here have been involved in programs that have run for the past two, three decades. And currently, the One Help program is really helping us to do that even more. And ILRI has also worked in creating initiative, approach incentives through some of the innovations to ensure that the food producers themselves really have the knowledge and have the incentive to be really moving towards the food which is safe for their own consumption, but also safe at the marketplace. And that was done through an excellent work looking at the value chain, looking at some of the areas where we could be vulnerable. And you'll hear a lot of that throughout this book launch. And we also, through the work that we have done to recognize that informal markets are actually a considerable portion of where the food comes from. If we can continue to focus on that, we will be able to generate considerable gains. And about this report, the mission has been to improve, ILRI mission is really to improve food and nutritional security. And given the breadth of the depth of this work, the commission, this work was really commissioned to look at the informal sector, as I mentioned, in lower middle income countries. And the book is really offering us new direction for tackling food safety risks in the informal sector in developing countries. And addresses some of the, provides some of the key recommendations that we can take on board. And more importantly, I want to single out that some of those recommendations will also be providing guidelines in terms of how new investment can come into the work that we are trying to do. The authors here, Steven, Spencer, and many others, I really want to thank you for this. And we are going to hear much more from what you're saying here. Let me close by thanking the funders who have provided us the necessary resources to do this work over the years, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, the Foreign Commonwealth Development Organization of the UK, the Australia Center for International Agriculture Research, and of course the World Bank. I would, it would be remiss of me to finish this without thanking our excellent partners who have worked with us in the countries where we have our footprint. Let me close here by thanking everybody who has been involved in this. And I'm looking forward to engaging this conversation that I hope will go beyond the one and a half hours that we have today. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be part of this conversation. Thank you, Paulina, for giving us those insightful remarks and really reminding us how this fits into the context of agricultural research in development in lower middle income countries. Right, so now we'll give the floor to Julianne Lampietti, Manager for Global Engagement, Agriculture and Food Global Practice at the World Bank. Welcome, Julianne. Thank you, Sylvia. Good morning to everyone. Good afternoon. Good evening wherever you are in the world. Welcome to World Food Safety Day. We're absolutely delighted to co-host this event, and particularly with Ilri, a longtime partner of the World Bank. Paulina, thank you for those nice words. And we are really, you know, longtime partners with the CGIAR. So this is very important for us to co-host this event today. And we have a massive challenge ahead of us. Paulina highlighted some of the number of 600 million people ill every year from foodborne disease. You know, many more deaths. Now, those numbers are from 2015, keep in mind. And a lot of people say that COVID-19 started in a food market. And the importance of those numbers has probably grown in the impact on our economy. The global economy has grown significantly. And I think it's really important to reflect that if we had better food safety systems in place, we could have probably avoided or prevented a lot of what happened with COVID. So please keep that in mind as you listen to today's talk. No matter how you look at this problem related to food safety, you know, it's producing large negative externalities. And therefore, there's a very strong case for public sector intervention and action here. That includes knowledge, like we're going to hear about today. It includes regulatory aspects. It includes investments in infrastructure and many other things. Why do we have such a large informal sector in this space? There's many answers to that. One, of course, is that you have 8 billion people that need to eat on the planet. And so they have to get their food from somewhere. And so you have markets everywhere. And the urban space is growing really rapidly. And so we're getting a lot of this phenomenon occurring in urban space. The other is, you know, almost everyone knows how to cook in some way or another. And so, you know, people can enter the food market very informally and at very low cost. So as you think about this problem, think about its vastness and its interconnectedness on everything we do. That a lot of people come to the World Bank and say, why are you not doing more on this particular issue of food safety? You guys invest all this, you know, billions and billions of dollars in agriculture and food every year. So there's a couple reasons. The first is that it's always important to remember the World Bank is demand driven as an institution. So our clients come to us and decide where they want to spend their money. And so our ability to do investments in food safety types of issues are really predicated on convincing them through knowledge that this is an important space to put their money. The second is, you know, particularly informal markets and urban food safety issues fall between a lot of institutions in the kind of traditional frameworks that we deal with. Part of it is the Ministry of Agriculture. Part of it is a food safety agency and part of it, a lot of it is municipalities. And so I suspect to some degree a lot of what we do in this space does not actually get counted because it's within these various groups and no one is actually checking a box saying we're doing it. I know also that in my own experience and I've worked on a number of projects that have tried to upgrade food safety systems in countries. One, there's lots of very difficult governance issues in this space. Two, the greatest success I've seen has been when you've got a lot of incentives associated with a very clear regulatory framework. And so those are the sticks and carrots that are described in this particular report which I think is an excellent piece of work. And of course, you know, if we can get that framework right and we can get those incentives right, we can get our IFC colleagues to come into this space. One of the things we do and we continue to do is lots of advocacy. Stephen was closely associated with that when he worked at the World Bank and produced an excellent report called the Food Safety Imperatives. I'm really delighted to see this work by Spencer, Stephen and Shoe go forward right now. For us going forward, we hope this draws a lot of attention from our countries and that we can use the One Health framework that is in place on pandemic prevention and preparedness to create investments. We have lots of urban upgrading investments that could be brought to bear in this space. And of course, don't forget that the governments of the world are spending three quarters of a trillion dollars every year on incentives in agriculture and food. And that could be redirected some of the ways that they outline in this report. So with that, I'm very much looking forward to hearing the outcomes of today's discussion and very much looking forward to our continued collaboration with the CGIR. Thank you all for participating and back to you Silvia. Thank you Julian. And thank you also for illustrating so well the complexities and of this massive and wicked problem. But yeah, we are all looking forward to potential solutions and this is the perfect introduction now to our next speaker because now is the time to pretend the report. New directions for tackling food safety risks in the informal sector of developing countries and we have one of the co-authors Steven Jaffe who will take us through the content of the report in the main findings. Steven is a lecturer at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland. So welcome Steve and the floor is yours. Thank you very much and it's a pleasure to be here on World Food Safety Day. I'm going to be presenting on behalf of my co-authors Spencer Henson from the University of Guelph and Shuo Wang from the University of Maryland. Let me share my screen and voila. Did it work? Yes we can see your screen. You're seeing the PowerPoint version or the just the the outline. It's not in presentation mode yet. There we go. Yep that's good. Okay so in this brief presentation I'm going to highlight the problem statement, give you a taste of the perspectives that we offer on the different subjects and outline the way forward as we see it. You can get more details in the report. I'm going to be deliberately a bit provocative in the presentation in order to make you curious enough to want to read the report. We very much thank Ilri for their guidance during the initiation and conduct of this work and in this organization of the event. When we began the work we were looking for bridges. We were trying to see how do you link the sort of top-down food safety initiatives and the bottom-up food safety initiatives. In the end we found some bridges but in some perhaps unexpected places and I'll make highlight some of that today. So first the sort of problem statement. So if we consider the food systems in developing countries are evolving quite quickly. We tend to have a hybrid system which combines larger players and closely coordinated value chains together with a plethora of micro and very small-scale players. Yet food system fragmentation and informality really are the norm in in still in most low and lower middle income countries. And the overall predominance of smaller players and less formal channels is especially common when it comes to fresh produce, meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, and also out of home eating particularly in cities. This is important ramifications for the incidents and management of food safety risks in developing countries as these products are recognized as leading vectors of foodborne disease. So one of the starting points is looking at what's the state of play and so there are indeed serious and widespread food safety issues in the informal sector. And over the past two decades there have been many dozens if not hundreds of papers written that are based on localized surveys of traditional markets in formal food vendors, workers involved in small companies. While the picture is not monolithic it really points to widespread deficiencies in food safety awareness in food handling and preparation practices and the physical conditions under which the public markets operate and these food actors operate. The literature also points to deficiencies in consumer food safety awareness and the limited effectiveness of some of their strategies to reduce their own exposure to food safety hazards. Other studies point to the high incidents and high levels of microbial, chemical, and other contaminants in foods, especially the fresh foods that are sold in these markets and through these vendors. In the report we provide some brief summary of this empirical literature. And this is sort of taking one example. This is from a study that was looking at a major Asian city where there's hundreds of community markets and they account for the bulk of the consumer purchases. And let me just sort of quote quickly. Degradation is widespread. Waste and wastewater collection and treatment does not meet the required capacity. Supply of clean water isn't insufficient. Risk of inundation and poor drainage is high etc etc. Meat has been sold, has not been stored in cold containers leading to exposure to the environment. Benders leave fresh meat and process ones next to each other. There's no record of product origin etc. The infrastructure conditions and practices just a high risk of microorganism contamination, the fresh agricultural produce etc. Now this commentary would really fit the description of community markets in many developing countries. For in many places these markets have fallen into this repair, have not been substantially upgraded for decades and resources not been set aside or mobilized to do so. Okay, there are problems. But do small players and informal channels really contribute very much to the overall burden of foodborne disease in developing countries? Recent assessment work by the WHO and others has shed more statistical light on the overall incidence and public health burden of foodborne disease in different parts of the world. And in a recent World Bank study, we and other colleagues, we put some dollar value on this burden in an attempt to mobilize more public investment in domestic food safety. But how does the informal sector fit into this improved understanding of the overall public health and economic consequences of unsafe food? We couldn't find any estimates of this. So we patched together, we based on various factors and came up with our own back of the envelope estimates which are featured here in this table, the top part of the table. So that outlines the structure of food markets in different country types. And the bottom is the foodborne disease burden and what it's attributable. And really why the the exact measure of this is going to vary from country to country. We estimate that for low and low lower middle income countries that a large or very large majority of the burden of foodborne illness attributed to marketed foods can be attributed to the informal sector. Hence unsafe food and informal distribution channels represents a central, not a peripheral part of the food safety challenge facing developing countries. Okay, but you might ask, isn't this just a transitional issue? Isn't it one that will be addressed through ongoing processes of food system transformation and or regulatory oversight? Some countries we've certainly seen an increasing share of supermarkets and other modern retail formats as well as increased investment by international fast food companies and the emergence of private food standards and food governance arrangements. Won't these larger players, this formalization process, this consolidation process and management systems crowd out the traditional players and lessen the significance of the informal sector food safety problem? We've also seen increasing resources going toward national food safety agencies and associated food testing, food business inspection services. Won't this enhance centralized capacity for effective, be effective at addressing the informal food safety problem? With some exceptions, we believe the answer to both these questions is a resoundly no. First, food system formalization is a long-term process. Traditional players and informal channels will remain prominent for many years in processing and retail and food service. Second, many central government agencies have minimal contact with let alone leverage over most traditional growers and small-scale processors and vendors. As a result of dietary and demographic changes, we do expect almost a general escalation of food safety challenges, including in relation to the informal sector, as countries transition into and through lower middle income status with business as usual. Hence, this is a big problem. It may get bigger and it's not going away. So what are some perspectives that we offer in the paper? First, conceptually, we try to tweak the sort of conceptually way of looking at the problem. We sort of unbundle it a little bit. Most commonly, the food safety problem is defined as either an awareness gap or a regulatory capacity gap, or both. Often, the players involved and the developing country settings are cast as sort of as homogeneous. We provide a modified perspective, first by defining the problem as a combination of limited capacity and weak incentives, and we consider a range of capacity and incentive types, both internal and external, to the food operators. Sustained improvements are going to require concerted action, both in regard to incentives and capacity. We distinguish four different types of players in contrast to risk profiles and really the scope for policy interventions. That is, we distinguish between traditional kiosk operators, produce vendors in public markets, microscale food processors, and street food vendors and other informal food service operators. They're different in terms of their product mix, their location, their licensing, their interface with consumers, and save a different risk profile. And the settings vary a lot. Low and middle income countries come in all shapes and sizes, being in various stages of demographic and food transformation, transformation, having different administrative structures and resources available to them. Hence, we don't see this as a field where one size fits all, or where the priorities or targeted players would be the same from place to place. So another part of the review looks at country experiences, trying to tackle food safety issues in the informal sector, including what we know about the efficacy. We look at some broad strategies and consider interventions that can be categorized either as capacity-related or incentive-related. We also look at insights in other fields where behavioral changes are needed and where informal players are particularly active, things like traditional medicine, trash collection, brick making, some other fields. We found that very few of the food safety interventions believe apply to holistic vision on how the problems might be addressed, and few have sought to bring synergies across important objectives and interventions. An important exception to this seems to be playing out now in India, where its Eat Right India program has bundled together goals related to healthy eating, food safety, environmental sustainability, and they're employing an array of interventions trying to overcome the typical constraints faced in a hybrid food system populated by tens of millions of small players. They're applying a differentiated approach based on type of enterprise. For larger enterprises, it's the traditional regulatory enforcement approach. With small and medium enterprises, emphasis is on capacity building. And for micro and market players, the emphasis is on bundling or clustering together on collective action amongst the players and improving site and services on the infrastructure side. The program looks very promising, yet we need to better understand what aspects are working better than others and what challenges are being faced in implementation. So what's our overall assessment? First, we see important policy gaps. Very few countries have included the informal sector in their overall vision of national food system development or defined a coherent approach to this sector in their national food laws. Many see the informal sector as inconsistent with their notion of a competitive and resilient food system and inconsistent with their notion of modern city. Despite their importance for food and nutritional security, the upkeep of public or community markets has often been an area of neglect. Second, some interventions have probably been counterproductive. Official interactions with the sector often involve attempts to disrupt informal businesses or issue fines or other punishments due to non-compliance with this or that regulation. Third, some interventions have shown promising initial results. Yet sustaining these gains has been difficult with a follow-up effort to complementary investments in infrastructure and in the overall enabling environment. This applies to many of the food safety training and awareness-raising programs. Overall, there seems to be a lot of missed opportunity to leverage food safety interventions and systems with water and sanitation, nutrition, urban upgrading or other better resourced programs. Where is action most needed or urgent? What countries most need to find effective ways to impact at scale food safety in the informal sector? We see these challenges being especially great and largely unresolved in most low and lower middle income countries. As these countries where the informal sector is most prominent, where dietary and demographic changes are most rapid, where there's a growing gap between food safety, management needs and prevailing capacity, and where there is most uncertainty as to the tools which government can use. Also, in many of these countries, the attitudes towards the informal sector are either hostile or ambiguous and very rarely, very progressive. In the report, we draw attention to the comparatively much weaker institutional capacities for food safety management in lower, lower middle income countries. Also, the much wider set of constraints faced by cities and especially small cities in such countries to act on food safety matters. All right, so based on our reading of the scale and nature of the food safety problem and past interventions, we propose a modified strategy for making substantive and sustained progress. I will get to this in a second, but first three points of caution. First, we do not think that just devoting more resources to the current line of action will deliver much better results. Second, we think it's unlikely that the standalone topic of food safety and informal sector can mobilize fish and policy attention and resources that's needed to actually obtain results at scale. Rather, the problem or the opportunity may need to be better paired with or seen as a leverage point for other better resource development objectives and interventions. And third, we came away from our review somewhat humbled by the notion that addressing unsafe food in the informal sector is as much a political economy or governance issue as it is a technical issue. So what are the elements of the new direction strategy outlined in the report? It's based on three pillars or propositions. First, we don't believe that centralized agencies can deliver safer food in the informal sector. Primary interfaces between government and the informal food operator is a current local level, especially involved municipal governments. Integrating the informal sector into national food safety laws would be desirable, yet the more realistic mainstreaming can be done by including the informal sector and the growing number of strategies for healthy, sustainable and resilient cities and incorporating them in urban plans and institutional arrangements or urban food governance. Municipal agencies and other decentralized units would need to play a dominant role in the engagement, support and regulatory oversight of informal food operators when it comes to food safety. We realize that many cities are not currently well prepared to do so, but we don't see it all realistic alternative. And as with the broader urban food system agenda, we can't expect cities to act alone and to develop all the rules and programs themselves. National entities will need to ensure that cities have proper mandates, provide them with technical guidance, supplemental resources. Indeed, in the example, the implementation is being done at the state and municipal levels, but it's a very strong level of support and guidance coming from the center. Second, standalone food safety programs and projects may not be the most successful means of mobilizing and deploying resources. Rather, food safety initiatives could be better incorporated into other programs and synergies realized by combining attention to food safety with that for nutrition, animal health, environmental health, urban upgrading, or other prominent areas of action. We can't achieve progress at scale targeting individuals. There's a need to better leverage collective action to address both capacity and incentive-related problems, hence more attention given to strengthening, implementing programs through vendor small business and consumer organizations. Multi-stakeholder programs can play an important role. In hybrid food systems, involving diverse players, I think we face an enormous challenge of operationalizing the WHO's concept of shared responsibility between business consumers, government, and communities also. Multi-stakeholder platforms have been increasingly developed to address other urban food system issues, like food waste, food logistics, protection of peri-urban agricultural land. Going forward, why not also in relation to food safety? Third and finally, we need to rebalance a mix of sticks and carrots in the interface between government and the informal sector as low and lower middle income countries update their regulations and build their regulatory enforcement capacities. They should avoid the temptation to pursue a policing approach. Instead, they need to emphasize the promotion of good practice and sustained improvement. Inspectors should be awarded not according to the businesses they shut down or food vendors they fund, but rather how many food operators become compliant with acceptable standards. At the same time, food safety enforcement should not be seen as a revenue stream for municipalities or indeed for the inspectors. Yes, there'll always be a need for enforcement when sustained poor food safety practices are observed. However, at least some municipal food safety officers should be deployed not as inspectors, but as extension agents, promoting and facilitating food safety improvements. Many locations adopting this approach will require a mindset change on the part of municipal managers and field officers. The report outlines a differentiated mix of priority interventions depending on the type of enterprise and socioeconomic setting. This emphasizes our rejection of the one-size-fits-all approach. In the short presentation, I can't go into the details, but in operationalizing this strategy, the devil really is in the details. In implementing this strategy, there's also going to be an important element of applied research. Much more work is needed to understand what works well, what works less well in different contexts, in terms of inducing the needed behavioral changes and in sequencing, integrating different types of interventions. Insights from practice will need to be shared both among the food safety practitioner community and among the growing network of people working on broader urban food programs and governance. So I thank you very much. I look forward actually to the the insights and commentary from our panel. The report, this has the link here, but otherwise Ilwe will be sharing you that link. Thank you very much. Thank you, Stephen. That was a lovely overview and very challenging overview of such a long report. Thank you for offering those three ideas and pillars for the way forward that you are proposing. In fact, I'm sure that most of our participants have experience on food safety and informal markets. I'm sure they have their own views, so it will be really good to hear from you on the chat, on the Q&A, if you want to share your own experience. And as you do that, and also following from Steve's call for the need for research, action research, that will really help us contextualize the solutions to the different places. I'm really glad to be now giving the floor to Delia Grace, a professor at Food Safety Systems, Natural Resources Institute in the UK, and a joint appointed scientist at the International Lifestyle Research Institute. Delia has 30 decades of research in food safety and informal markets, so she will take us through her own experiences and findings through her research. Delia, over to you. Thank you. And I'm delighted to be here with everybody on World Food Safety Day and to see so many people have come to join us. I'll just share my screen and start a brief presentation, which is reflecting on some of the past research of Illry over the last few decades, and then looking forward to the next decades. So yes, so just quickly, I don't think at this stage, I don't think we need to spend too much time on what a serious problem food safety is. Many of us are aware of that, but when I started research in 2000 in Africa, food safety really wasn't on anyone's agenda. Nobody thought of food safety as being a really big development issue. And when it was thought of, it tended to be either on the farm, looking at things going on on the farm, or else very much thinking about export and could poor countries, in the same way as the Southeast Asian tigers exported their way out of poverty using technology, could Africa export its way out of poverty using food. In recent decades, that has changed dramatically. We're now fully aware of the huge burden of foodborne disease. The health impact is comparable to that of malaria, HIV AIDS, or TB. This is coming from that WHO study, in which several of us were involved. And I should say that these are very, firstly, they're out of date estimates that they were done nearly a decade ago. And also they are very conservative estimates. According to the WHO, one in 10 people in Africa fall ill each year from foodborne disease. But in countries where we've got pretty good data like Greece or US, in those countries, it's one in six or one in three. So certainly, the food system in Africa is not much safer than the food system in Greek. Likewise, the economic burden is huge and more than $110 billion a year. And most of this is coming from the domestic markets, not from trade, which is where most of the investments have been. In terms of the foods implicated, the most risky foods are also the most nutritious foods, the foods we want people to consume more of, fish, meat, eggs, milk, vegetables. And most of these foods, these perishable, nutritious produce are sold in the wet markets, traditional markets in low and middle income countries. And while much of this food is unsafe and this food is responsible for the greater burden of foodborne disease, these traditional markets offer many other advantages. Food is cheap, it's fresh, local breeds are featured, it's accessible, you can buy food in small amounts, it provides livelihoods for women and youth. So when we think of the harms associated, the risks associated with wet markets, including spillover of disease and emergence of pandemics, we need also to think about the benefits these markets bring. So that was the sort of some of the motivation for conducting food safety research at ILRI and the program really only started in 2006 with backstopping from Cornell University. And at the first phase when, as I said, there had been very little food safety research, and much of the research had not been in a food safety orientation, it had been in a hazard orientation, not in a risk orientation. So the first decade there really was a focus on finding out on diagnosis, risk assessments, cost of illness calculations, policy analysis, understanding risk factors. Then from the middle of the last decade on, there started to be much more of a focus on interventions, risk management, what do we do, and in particularly what can be done that is affordable, effective, and will continue after the life of the project. And at this time too there was increasing engagement with regional, national, IGOs, including the African Union who are speaking today, and ILRI co-led the food safety theme in action track one of the United Nations Food Systems Summit, which was a huge process led by Lawrence Haddad overall in action track one. And the first time food safety got so much prominence in a UN process. So what have we learned? Well, we conducted many food safety interventions in many value, different value chains, here's just a picture of one in Uganda, often working in multiple places along the farm to fork pathway. And again, in the interest of time, I won't go into all the details, but just to give you a little bit of a flavor of what we were doing. These are some of the projects, typical projects conducted in Kenya, in India, a different one in Kenya, one in Nigeria, one in Senegal, over a period of time, starting in 1997, up till 2015. You can see that the cost of the projects was often quite low. The lowest project cost was about $20,000, and the highest cost was several million. And yet with projects costing only tens of thousands of dollars, we could reach hundreds to tens of thousands of traders. And in many cases, we were covering more than half of the traders or vendors in a given value chain in a given city or area. And this enabled us a game for costs of tens of thousands to reach hundreds of thousands to millions of consumers. So this is interesting because there was a lot of leverage, there was a lot of of multiplication and facts. We found that in an abling environment, some of these projects didn't really look at the government authorities, the municipal authorities, but more recently, some of them did, and then they started to have some policy influence. The interventions varied a lot, but they tended to have three, two essential components, one based on training and sometimes on simple technology, and then an incentive to try and find an incentive to change the architecture so that there was motivation for behavior change. And when we looked at the benefits, remember these projects all finished, the latest one finished in 2016. But many of them were able to show substantial benefits, millions of dollars benefits in Kenya and India, where we actually did an economic study. And in other countries, we showed significant improvements in knowledge attitude practice, significant reduction in unacceptable meat and in food risk. And for very acceptable costs, the cost of training butchers in Nigeria were $9 and the gains to averted diarrhea were $800 per butcher. However, in many cases, once the project came to an end, then activities came to an end. An exception was in India, where training and monitoring was supported by the government. So I keep learning from the first phase. Many interventions do not scale, scaling must be thought about from the start. But we know the critical success factors for scaling. And we often need to change only a small number of behaviors to get quite a lot of impact. And these behaviors can be changed by incentives and nudges. But authorities must be on board. So that led us to the next stage in which we have been, we have what we call the three-legged stool. And by this, we believe and we hypothesize that food safety can be scalably and sustainably improved in informal markets if and only if three conditions are met. First, there must be incentives for behavior change. That is what we call the pull approach. There must be motivation for food safety actors to change. And secondly, there must be capacity for food safety actors to change, what we call the push approach. And that usually requires some kind of informed awareness raising, training technologies. And thirdly, there needs to be an enabling environment, which means the authorities must be on board. And we must have more progressive ways of regulating food safety. At the moment, we have nine projects going on or just finished. And we are trying to pull together the learnings of these to come up with strong, clear guidelines for different contexts, which people can use to improve food safety in informal markets. And here's just an example of one of our success stories. This is a time of great promise where much has been done and much remains to do. And I would just draw attention to two really exciting things. One is the new food safety strategy for Africa, which has a very enlightened approach to food safety developed and endorsed by the African Union. And secondly, that we are now coming together a small group of us to revive the UN Coalition for Safe Food for All, which was so successful in bringing together many stakeholders around some game changing solutions. So I think when it comes to food safety, the situation has never been brighter. And I'm looking forward to the next working with you all for the next 10 years. Thank you, Delia. You have left us with such positive words. And it was really nice to see concrete examples of the action on the ground. So with that, we can move on to our panel time. We've actually put together a stellar panel. We have representations from five different organizations, national and international. So without waiting any longer, we'd like to welcome and give the floor to Simone Morais, Brazil, scientist, multi-sectoral action input systems from the World Health Organization. We are asking our panelists to tell us how their report and its content and messages really resonates with their organizations and the activities they may be doing. So Simone, thank you for being with us. And the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Good day to everyone, depending on the part of the world you are. And happy World Food Safety Day for those who are still on the 7th of June. Some may be on 8th, but we are celebrating the week, the whole week with events. Thanks for inviting me to the panel and to have the opportunity to read the report and to analyze and probably to incorporate the recommendations in our actions. The report brings a very interesting analysis on the issue of food safety and informal markets and vendors in low and middle income countries. I totally agree that we need to have coherent strategies for tackling food safety, risk as an informal sector, and we need to consider that each context will require a specific solution. I think to find potential solutions or to identify the best approach necessary to map informal markets and vendors, understand food consumption patterns. Delia also mentioned about the importance of consumer behavior change and involve them, also the small-scale producers. We also need to consider two additional aspects that I think are very important. Regarding the consumer's perspective, I think it's very important to understand why consumers choose to buy from informal market or vendors. The answer may be not the same for all the countries and it needs to be taken into consideration when establishing strategies. For example, why a consumer wants to go to a market to choose a live chicken to be slaughtered in the market and bring that to home? What drives this behavior? It's a culture, it's something that the mom and the grandmom always did, or because they don't trust in the inspection service and the counter. What's behind this behavior? If we don't understand that, we will not be able to define the strategies. Another aspect that I think it's very important to consider is that the whole of the woman in the food markets, if you go to a food market, most of the vendors you will find will be human. Why women choose to be in the informality or why they are driven to be to the informality? When we think about solutions from the food market perspective, we need you to think about those aspects. When we think about infrastructure that was mentioned by the World Bank colleague, we also need you to think about why human are there, maybe because they don't have a child care center to let their kids or because they don't have schools. They need to be in the informality because they can't take a formal job because they don't have a work to let the kids or they don't have someone to take care of the kids. How exposed are the kids as well to the risks in public markets? I think we need to have a moralistic approach. Consider also aspects that goes beyond food safety infrastructure. That is also important for that. In WHO, we do recognize the public health issues in informal markets. We are working on that and besides food safety, we are also considering other aspects related to the animal interface that happens in food markets. We need to consider also the exposure to live animals in the food markets and this happens with a frequency. We know that it's not only a food safety issue, but it's a public health issue that we need to consider. We can't only focus on food safety if we're not also tackling other sources of risks to consumers and to vendors. It's mainly occupational risks that we also need to consider. In this regard, during the pandemic WHO published an interim guidance on to reduce public health associated with sales of wildlife in traditional food markets. This document is now to be updated. We had a call for experts. We are about to start the discussion and to extend the scope of the document. The document was focused on mammalian species, live wild mammalian species in food markets. We are now considering the extension of the scope, turning it into a document, not an interim guidance, but into a guidance with recommendations based on scientific evidence and on the advice from the experts that will be part of this guidance development group. I think the report published by IRI will also be an important background document to be incorporated in this question for sure. I think it's very helpful and I will be sure to take a lot of advantage from the work you have done so far. Also my last comment, it's about the global strategy for food safety. The strategy aims to strengthen food control systems and a food control system also needs to recognize informal sectors. When we talk about enforcement and the sticks, it's a little bit more hard, but the call for engaging stakeholders, that is one of the strategic priorities of the strategy will also consider food markets and we recognize the need to involve local markets. I totally agree that this is a topic that needs to be addressed locally and although it's a little more complex to involve local governments, we needed to address that and that is for sure included in the strategy when we mentioned about involving all stakeholders. It also means involving all levels of governments and empowering local governments to intervene and to promote healthier food markets. I will stop here and happy to answer any questions if needed. Thank you very much. Thank you Simone. Thanks for those nice insights and how that relates to how you see this from your perspective and your organization. All right let me now give the floor to Marcus Lipp, Senior Food Safety Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Marcus. Thank you and thanks for having me. Happy Food Safety, a World Food Safety Day to everybody also from FAO of course. It's our delighted pleasure to celebrate today, World Food Safety, while 7th of June like Simone said for some it was yesterday. So yeah it's great to be here and let me start with my compliments or my appreciation to both the authors of that report and to Ilwe for funding it or driving it. I think it's really, really fantastic that a very comprehensive and systematic approach to informal markets has been achieved or published here because it will shape the discussions going forward. So for from FAO perspective the acro food system is incredibly complicated as we all know. It's not just the social dynamic because like a pollinaire said already everybody is a food expert. Anyway, everybody knows about food. There's no consumer product that is as emotional and as important cultural and as important from an identity perspective than there is food. So everybody knows everything about food and or at least enough to well maintain that they know how to deal with food. And that makes the discussion very complicated because it gets immediately very personal if there's behavioral changes that are required. Not impossible but complicated. Now also a pollinaire mentioned that already it is from a regulatory perspective or from an institutional perspective incredibly complicated. There's the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Agriculture, but also trade and tourism and a couple of other ministries. There's municipalities, there is federal governments and that depends on the country how exactly it looks and everybody wants to have a piece of the pie and food safety or claim some responsibility rightly so again complicating the picture. And informal markets are part of the acro food system. They have always been a part of the acro food system and they will stay there for quite some time to come because they're so important in terms of food availability and in terms of economic options for the participants there. Now then we come to the approach of how can we do better and of course the immediate claim or immediate requirement is okay we need a strengthened institutional capabilities for food safety but it also needs to be matched by strengthened capabilities to keep pace with that. And on top of it then there is this problem is the consumer even willing to pay so hence we have the whole consumer awareness and discussion around that and that has all already been discussed. So we we appreciate this report for its nuanced discussion and for its comprehensive discussion about all these different aspects that go into the informal system and what that means because we have been I think carelessly not all of us naturally but many publications have been carelessly just speaking about at the best case traditional markets at the worst case it was just wet markets which is pretty stigmatized ever since the pandemic of course. And that's not fair because there are so many graduations there are so many differences local differences so it is not one size fits all it cannot be that one size fits all. There has been enough publication even in willingness to pay studies that make it clear that it needs to be a more nuanced approach Delia had made given great examples there that need to be adapted to a local environment. And again circling back on the report I feel or we believe that this report gives us the language and gives us the framework the intellectual framework if you want to continue the discussion to continue to fine tune our discussions to expand our discussions and to build on this with interventions that hopefully improve food safety for everybody because that's the ultimate goal for everybody at least also from an FAO perspective food security is eliminating hunger the main driving goal for FAO but it has been realized for a long time that there cannot be food security if there is no food safety. So we need to improve food safety with all but that comes with all the complexities I alluded to and of course was much better illustrated by previous speakers. So to summarize I think it's a fantastic piece of work and my appreciation again for to Steve and to Spencer and to Ilri for financing and creating this body of work. I think it will be instrumental as a foundation or an anchor plot where we can all come back to and develop additional interventions additional frameworks on top of it because we have this common language that this report provides. I'll stop here but thank you so much. Thank you Marcus. Right our next panelist is Amare Ayaleo program manager and a partnership for Aflatoxin control in Africa at the African Union Commission. Welcome Amare and thank you for being with us over to you. Thank you very much Silvia also thank you very much for having me. First of all I would like to start by congratulating Ilri and the authors for producing this influential and very practical work. A lot of careful review and also quality thinking has gone into it. In the food safety space informal markets have been the elephant in the room so we are really happy to see this work at this time. Over the years we have seen some efforts to draw attention to the informal sector and we also have come to understand that policing individuals in the informal sector won't work but to my knowledge this is the first work with a very good conceptual framework as well as practical options to lift food safety in the informal sector. Let me highlight very few takeaways from this work. I had the opportunity to read it which I enjoyed. First of all based on evidence this work is also shown that the informal sector is there to stay. It will be with us the supermarket penetration is not going to displace it anytime soon so we have to deal with it. I think this is a very important point also coming with strong evidence. Secondly the work emphasized a lot that the informal sector is not homogeneous also Steve emphasized that during his short presentation and also the authors have tried to come up with some categories of the informal sector which in my opinion will be very useful to package the right interventions and also I think the emphasis on I am sorry if my power is out I will have to stop where it will take me so I think the other thing is also the emphasis to address this deficit system deficits politically I think that's also a very important point maybe in what could be considered to to improve it one area might be for the most part this report recognizes the central role of governments but I think around the recommendations in the West forward I think the the point that there is a lot of emphasis on on financing food controls national food controls is probably a little bit a little bit right right it seems that the battery of his computer died he actually alerted me to that we will have him back if he manages to black in his computer but I think we can now move on and will not welcome our next panelist Pawan Agarwal chief executive officer food future foundation and the former chief executive officer at the food safety and standards authority of India Pawan thank you for being with us over to you let me first of all extend my greetings to all of you on occasion of the world food safety day and also congratulate Steve and Spencer for this very timely report on food safety in the informal markets that was in some sense a key finding or key recommendation that came out of almost two year deliberations during the UN food system summit that I along with the delia had you know an opportunity to lead and you know deliberate over almost 18 to 24 months with experts in this particular field you know if I clearly remember I know that you know food safety and foodborne illnesses over 90 95% of them are in the low and middle income countries and that to predominantly from the informal markets so therefore it is extremely timely you know for this report and thank you Steve for making the reference to the work that was done in India and that is being done in India so as far as you know in my brief remarks on this occasion I will not really elaborate further on what has already been stated by Steve but maybe touch upon a few points that were not covered in you know in what Steve mentioned about eat right India movement and are you know focused on informal markets let me begin with the reason of our thinking you know so when I was assigned this responsibility in the government in India to look after the food safety authority in early part of 2016 and so I had occasion to visit Europe and America and I found that the the regulatory tools that are used in these countries would not work in India because you know we found that the nature of food system in India is very different from what you know exists in my own country and we have to find solutions for that and we immediately got down to doing something very differently than a pink the west on food safety in India and came out with very simple solutions to it even though we had a legislation which in some sense was a lot inspired by food safety regulations in Europe but in application of those laws we thought there is a leeway of doing something very differently than what is normally done to address food safety concerns and one of them was a differentiated or we call it graded approach which I think Steve mentioned very clearly that we found that even though food standards same as food standards will apply to the formal and informal market but when we apply to the informal market we could focus on empowerment of the consumers you know a big focus on changing the culture and demand creating demand for safe food from the consumers that was one thrust area for us and second thrust area was building capacity I think these two seas culture and capacity was what Delia mentioned in her brief remarks so this is the approach that we took second is as rightly pointed out that informal markets are very complex and India is a large country and therefore it is even more complex so we thought that if it is complex how do we address it so we have to slice it in small bits so that each bit is simple and therefore we looked at informal markets through the lens of simplicity and created very simple checklists you know and those checklists were even presented and displayed in the premises of these people so that it continues to remind them that these are 10 things or 12 things that they are supposed to be doing you know and it also helped the regulatory staff and inspections etc so I think simplification of the regulatory systems was very very important to ensure its applicability to the informal markets because if we use the same instruments that are used in advanced countries for formal markets for ensuring food safety in informal markets it will obviously make food very expensive and I don't think that will work so this is the second thing third is huge focus on capacity and training building today India has one of the biggest training ecosystem for food safety over one million food safety supervisors have been trained and there are about 200 or more you know training providers that are you know you know working to provide that training so all that training ecosystem is in fact in some kind of a public private partnership the fourth area is hygiene rating or even cluster third party certifications because whether food safety is being maintained or not maintained somebody has to go and check it you know we cannot really rely on these small and petty businesses and that is where you know we came in the whole idea of third party the audits and certifications the problem was there were not too many agencies who could handle this job and therefore we came out with some kind of where we call it hygiene mitra you know professionals who have some basic training and education in food and food and train them to you know go and inspect whether those few things that are on the checklists are being followed or not and give them a little more training on food safety risks etc so hygiene rating and third party certifications at scale what was adopted and they're you know they're about half a million businesses that have been hygiene rated clusters have been covered under this fifth is that how do we engage you know IEC and we adopted a very innovative approach which we call as triple E engage, excite you know I think our businesses should be excited about doing the right things and unless they're excited you know they will not do those things so excitement was very important part of the whole process of change and finally enable them to bring about that change you know so the capacity building but also work with them in case they are not able to do it help them to do it you know so triple E approach is what we adopted sixth point was around combined food safety with nutrition and sustainability we found that in amongst the policy makers and various people you know food safety is not high on the agenda maybe sustainability is maybe you know nutrition is so we brought under E right movement all three elements together and they were small bits and in fact as I think she mentioned or Delia also mentioned that you know some of the most nutritious food like foods and vegetables very is also has the highest food safety risks so I think combining these three elements was very important to bring excitement and to get everyone involved and finally recognition and reward a very strong recognition and reward system you know this was not really cash incentives they were not huge money spent on it today I can say that I have left the organization about two and a half years ago and all those initiatives are only grown by scale about one fifth of the country is currently covered and our objective was not to cover the whole country one who it is a large country so we wanted that administrations local administrations in India we have a strong district authorities which also have some kind of an oversight control on the municipal authorities so if they come forward and say that we take responsibility of food safety in our own areas I think it is very very important so recognition and reward and I think the now wonderful things are happening across the country in fact one of the cities in India Rao Kela is being awarded the Milan Pact award you know next week and they have done some very interesting stuff covering a very large city about you know about a million and a half population to address food safety issues in a very comprehensive food safety and nutrition issues in a very comprehensive manner so these are innovative approaches that India is adopting I think I have all reason to believe that I think food safety because it is primarily a informal market issue there is a need for global agencies to look at food safety with a fresh lens and this report provides that opportunity for global agencies to look at food safety with that fresh lens thank you very much for the opportunity that you did me thank you for one and it's so nice to see a real concrete example of how these recommendations are already been implemented and what effect they are having on food safety in a formal market right last but definitely not least our fifth panelist Nika Larian food loss and waste advisor center for nutrition at the United States Agency for International Development Bureau for Resilience and Food Security thank you Nika for being with us and the floor is yours thank you for inviting me to celebrate the launch of this report I want to start by applauding the reports called Action and Ilri's updated research that informs our programmatic approach to food safety which includes informal markets at USAID we are focused on expanding local consumer access to and affordability of safe nutritious food to improve diets through Feed the Future the U.S. government's global hunger and food security initiative led by USAID the USAID food safety division manages a diverse portfolio of partners and collectively we are exploring ways to improve the enabling environment for food safety in different parts of the food system including local food systems informal or traditional markets have become an important research focus at USAID and this is an important step in the right direction as others have mentioned as recently as a few years ago food safety wasn't the development imperative it is today it's clear that safer traditional markets are a critical access point to nutritious food particularly in areas already vulnerable to malnutrition and food insecurity when consumers across the African continent access over 80 percent of their food from informal markets action and investment become critical so that access to safe nutritious food is maintained even in the face of shocks and stressors such as the global food crisis and climate change USAID is exploring how to build the demand for food safety among consumers and vendors and traditional markets we're doing this specifically through the Feed the Future program called evidence and action towards safe nutritious foods or EatSafe in Nigeria EatSafe is implementing four country specific interventions that seek to increase consumer demand for and vendor capacity to provide safe food as informed by EatSafe's formative research to better understand the cultural environment and individuals preferences behaviors and beliefs regarding food safety I want to highlight EatSafe because of its focus on both incentives and capacity and I was constantly reminded of EatSafe while reading through the reports recommended balancing of carrots and sticks first to create incentives for food safety EatSafe focused on creating a regulatory system which rewards and places social pressure to improve food safety practices to do this EatSafe established the Association for Promotion of Food Safety and Improved Nutrition or AFSAN to convene a group of market actors and stakeholders via a Nigerian government registered association to advocate for improved food safety additionally to improve food safety practices in traditional markets the Abenzi Fest Fest safe food brand provides in-market visual cues to inform consumers which vendors are implementing food safety best practices through training and an opt-in brand program secondly in addition to capacity building through vendor training EatSafe raises awareness and supports food safety education through the Seya Nagari radio show which produces weekly episodes with influential on-air personalities call-in sessions and scripted dramas with 700,000 listeners and lastly the safe food market stand provides a physical space in the market where consumers can access food safety information while they shop as such USA food safety programming takes a context-driven multi-sectoral approach and supports research to help us understand which interventions are most effective throughout the food safety life cycle therefore we applaud the evidence and call to action put forward by this report thank you and happy world food safety day thank you sorry I lost my screen for a second thank you Nika for your net remarks for reminding us of additional work happening in this sphere of the research EatSafe project and others to which this report really contributes to and into that evidence based well so that brings us to the end of the panel as usual times always goes fast and the one wants I'm afraid we don't have time to take any questions to the panelists please write your questions and I can see the in the Q&A there's already some questions the panelists and the authors of the report will answer to all the questions and we will circulate that after the meeting with this I'd like to move on to the closing remarks and for that I'd like to invite whom Gurian who is the program leader of the animal and human health program at Ilri whom the floor is yours thank you very much Sinvia for the introduction good morning good afternoon good evening everyone I would like to say happy happy world food safety day as well to all the views so and thank you very much over 150 participants of this webinar from different countries different sectors this shows us the interest of food safety is very important for this day okay so I would be very brief by saying that I'm very happy to see this rich discussion around the launch of this report the report is very important work made by Steven Spencer and Huang thank you very much for the effort and it reminds me our discussion sometimes ago together with Delia who was leading food safety at CGAR but also our dear colleague Jean-Marc Dagmoth from IPRI leading the CGAR program on our new country for nutrition and health so we discussed the framework of this report and I'm very happy to have it launched today that's the one food safety day showing the review of the updated evidence on the food safety in informal and traditional or wet market in low and middle income countries I think that is a very good body of knowledge put together by Steve and his colleagues but more importantly addressing the way forward and options to really improve food safety in these difficult conditions I'm also very happy to have the comment from different colleagues and friends and partners in particular WHO FAO African Union USAID and so on and I just want to say that of course you know you own the speaker and panelists didn't say didn't refer to the one health framework the food safety is really a major pillar of the one health concept that now owns organization refer to and of course in the framework of quarterly part time including our colleague here Simone from the WHO but also FAO Huawei and UNEP they came up with the new definition or updated definition of one health and also the new action plan to address this quarter of part time and happily to see also that food safety is one of the five or six pillars of this joy action plan a quarter part time to implement one health so you see this is important to address food safety in particular food safety in informal market in low and middle income countries and I think that the discussion today offers the opportunity to reflect but more importantly to really tackle on the field in term of intervention because for me we know enough the response by foodborne disease from informal market and the important thing is now on together with Joy Han to address to make interventions on the crowd and of course you know the recommendation of Steve and Spencer and Wang sometimes it's very provocative like he said from the beginning but it gives opportunity to refer also to our own research in terms of intervention on the crowd to meet something in the middle to come up with the food strategy to improve food safety in traditional market in low and middle income countries and I hope that you know the remark from Amare from African Union and also Simone with the two food safety strategies recently published from Africa but also at global level will be the framework so that we can work together we serve you and also we collaborate with you from research side to work in the context of CJR so we have one health initiative of one CJR but also many other projects on food safety and money effort in different countries to improve food safety worldwide so thank you very much I would like to thank you very much on a view for participation and in particular thank you the authors but also Cynthia my colleague who have moderated very well this session and wish you all the best and have the safe food because if you don't have safe food so we don't have food security so thank you very much and again happy World Food Safety Day 2023 over to you thank you for the closing remarks with that the only thing that remains for me to say is thank you all participants for for your contributions for listening in we've noticed there's quite a number of questions in the Q&A we'll take care of those at the end of of the meeting when the recording is available we will be emailing everyone who registered for the webinar we'll share the recording and we will share answers to the questions that were unanswered today and we'll share our links to the report and other resources thank you everyone and have a good rest of the day bye