News & Comment

The recently established Africa Food Safety Agency (AfFSA) will be a Specialized Technical Institution of the African Union, tasked with coordinating and harmonizing food safety policies and regulations, while providing for centralized risk assessment capacity and food safety data hub. It will promote experience and capacity sharing across African Union Member States and international partners. AfFSA will contribute to public health, food and nutrition security, and intra-Africa and global trade in safe foods. The statutory functions of AfFSA are relevant to stakeholders within Africa and globally who in turn could play key roles to enable it successfully deliver its functions.

As the FAO/WHO has completed the rigorous identification of food safety hazards of cell-based food, this article identifies remaining research gaps, particularly in the economic and social sciences, that need to be filled to better meet the expectations of cell-based food production.

In the European Union, the adequacy of the novel food framework to deal with cultivated meat has been questioned by several political initiatives at member state and Union levels. This contribution argues that the novel food framework is fit for regulating the entrance into the market of cultivated meat and that the use of the precautionary principle to ban cultivated meat production and commercialization is not justified. It then illustrates how existing regulatory provisions already provide the EU gastronomic heritage with adequate safeguarding, if and when cultivated meat will enter the EU market.