Topic: “Needs for Adoption and Enforcement of International Standards”
Speaker: Dane Bernard, Vice-President, Food Safety and Quality Assurance, Keystone Foods LLC

Abstract
Consumer confidence is the key component in retaining market share for consumer goods including foods and food ingredients. For foods especially, confidence will erode if consumer safety issues emerge in the absence of messages affirming that an adequate system is in place to detect and prevent any recurrence of the problems. The basic elements of such a system include effective laws and regulations designed to prevent adulteration in conjunction with effective inspection and enforcement. Such a system must be open, transparent and verifiable in order to retain consumer confidence.

Trade in food and food ingredients will be facilitated by adoption by each country of legislation and regulations that conform to accepted standards of food safety. Without such a system of uniform and recognized approaches to food safety, documenting equivalency of food safety assurance systems will be more difficult and facilitation of trade in foods and food ingredients will become more fragmented and less efficient. But as we consider and adopt accepted approaches to food safety, we should consider all options. In certain situations, it may be far better to adopt HACCP based prescriptive regulations than to mandate that processors develop their own HACCP plans. In selected situations, prescriptive regulations may serve to clarify requirements while providing a platform for simple and effective government oversight.

Biography
Dane Bernard is Vice President of Food Safety and Quality Assurance at Keystone Foods LLC and has global responsibilities. Prior to joining Keystone, he was Vice President, Food Safety for NFPA. He received his B.S. from Purdue University and a Master’s degree from the University of Maryland. He has been an invited expert to five International Consultations sponsored by FAO and WHO dealing with certain aspects of HACCP, Risk Analysis and other food safety issues. He has been a member of the U.S. delegation to the Codex Committee on Food Hygiene and the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods.<back>