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Basic Paper Conference: Forum 3: Product Safety: Basic Paper Food production systems are developing continuously. Increasing demands are being put on both the product and the production process. These demands seem to be related to the wealth of the people and (hence) will further increase in future. Questions that arise are how far and in what way they will develop, and how the livestock farmers and industry should anticipate. In 1998 Thomas Urban wrote an interesting and challenging paper on this subject in Choices, a semi-scientific journal of the US agricultural economists. He stated that over the next 25 years a food system will develop (that he called the Prescription Food System) that will make the present system primitive, unorganised, and unregulated. He predicts a significant shift in consumer attitudes, buttressed by research discoveries, that will move the traditional commodity-based food production system into a prescription system. Consumer expectations for food are already beginning to include standards which reflect safety, health, and the environment. Cost, taste, and availability, the traditional elements of food preferences, are still important and will continue to be, but the future structure of the world's food system will primarily be patterned after pharmaceutical standards for research, production, distribution, and pricing. The operating and structural consequences of this significant shift will be extraordinary for each step in the development, production, distribution, and purchase of food, according to Urban. The key elements in his prescription system are transparency and traceability. The consumer will expect to be able to trace each food item back to its earliest production step. This is a revolutionary change in the world's food system. The purchaser of a sirloin steak will know which animal it came from, with what and how the animal was fed, the range or confinement growing conditions of the animal, and how the animal was slaughtered and packaged. This process can in essence be considered a prescription for a sirloin steak, and similar prescriptions will be required for all foods (meat, grains, vegetables, and fruits - fresh and processed), according to Urban. The first driver behind this system is our heightened sensitivity to food-borne diseases. Our concern for health, the perceived relationship between diet and disease, and production practices and diseases (pesticides and herbicides) have increased consumer sensitivity. The second driver is our increasing concern for animal welfare and the environment. The recognition that the 'how' of food production has significant consequences in this respect. The third driver, according to Urban, is that as we begin to develop specific genetic profiles for individuals, we will relate those profiles to nutritional needs. We then have the ability to 'prescribe food', as we do that today for obesity, high blood pressure, allergens, and diabetes. The consequences of these changes for the players in tomorrow's food system will be enormously. A farm may well come to resemble a drug manufacturing site, albeit still open to the weather, requiring detailed record keeping and restrictions on the choice of inputs and practices. Each farm will be required to provide transparency and traceability to all of its inputs (saleables, crops, and animals), as well as its waste (water, manure, and unused roughage). The government will require that waste be chemically analysed and its further use follow prescribed procedures. Food processors will be required to look very much like a pharmaceutical manufacturing, taking the product from the farm along with the accumulated records and continuing to document the process, thereby describing traceability and transparency. These same control and identification procedures will be required in each step until the product reaches the consumer. The consumer will be able then to trace all foods back to their origins. Such changes will require significant upgrading of the professionalism, talents, and expertise at all levels of the food system. The need for traceability and control will be re-inforced by liability issues that expectations of consumers will generate. Information management and quality control issues will speed the integration of farmers. Those who do not meet the new demands will be rapidly removed from the system. Those who adapt will remain. Urban expects these changes to be global in nature. As food is produced world-wide, these new standards will also quickly be required in the developing world which aspires to be part of the world food system. The unease present in consumers' minds over problems with imported foods is pushing the system toward 'international traceability'. Modernisation and industrialisation of agriculture have come rapidly, but these changes will pale in significance to the changes driven by the changing consumers' definition of food from commodity to prescription. Urban's thoughts raises a number of interesting question to discuss, such as:
A. A. Dijkhuizen H.-W. Windhorst |