Organisers of the America Trades Produce Conference have announced in a press release that food safety will be a strong component on the programme when the event gets underway on 21-23 March in Tubac, Arizona, near the US import hub of Nogales.
With food safety understanding and global requirements continuing to advance and evolve for the fresh produce industry, ATP has invited two senior food safety authorities from the US and Mexico to discuss the way forward.
The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) deputy commissioner for foods, Mike Taylor, and Mexico’s food safety authority’s (Senasica) general director of food, Octavio Carranza, will discuss how the Food Safety Modernization Act in the US (FSMA) and MexicoGAP complement each other.
Jim Gorny, senior advisor for produce safety at FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, will also speak in the same session.
“To have a key architect of FSMA in Mike Taylor, on stage with his counterpart in Mexico, Octavio Carranza, is an unprecedented opportunity for the industry,” said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas, which is co-hosting the event with Texas Produce Association (TPA).
“Mike and Octavio will lay out their vision for food safety, and the audience will have a chance to ask questions. This is a great chance for a response session for the industry.”
Additionally, attendees will have the chance to get an inside look at how FDA, the Centers for Disease Control, Senasica and the industry react to a hypothetical food safety incident.
The session, titled “The Mechanics of Responding to a Food Safety Outbreak/Recall”, will feature representatives of FDA, SENASICA, CDC and the industry, to walk delegates through a hypothetical food safety scenario, responding step by step to details of an investigation as it unfolds.
“Food safety is the regulatory tsunami facing the produce industry for the foreseeable future, especially the import-export community,” explained TPA president John McClung.
“This conference will allow participants to hear the latest on two matters that will directly impact their bottom line:the long-awaited Produce Rule, and the Foreign Supplier Verification Rule. These issues will reshape US-Mexico produce trade in the decade to come, and this conference is the perfect window to learn about them.”
Another session, “The Mexican Papaya Autopsy” will explore ongoing food safety advances and lessons learned from a 2011 papaya recall, again featuring an FDA representative.
A further session on the conference programme will also give importers a glimpse into FDA’s import processes.
Domenic Veneziano, director of FDA’s Division of Import Operations and Policy, together with Adrian Garcia of the FDA Nogales office, will discuss two new important risk-based preventative control tracking systems.
Those systems are: the Predictive Risk-based Evaluation for Dynamic Import Compliance Targeting (PREDICT) and Import Trade Auxiliary Communications System (ITACS).
