Scientific Challenges and Cost-Effective Management of Risks Associated with Implementation of Produce Safety Regulations

This proposal provides the specialty crop industry with tools to effectively manage risks while making most efficient use of available resources. Our approach will provide objective assessment of health, economic, and risk impacts of food safety systems. We will identify the most important factors that drive food safety risks by explicitly acknowledging and analyzing uncertainty. We will help the specialty crop industry 1) develop and validate scientifically supportable food safety metrics that are applicable in a variety of growing regions, commodities, and farm sizes; 2) provide scientific and technological knowledge to develop metrics important to enhancing produce food safety; and 3) identify improved approaches and techniques that allow the attainment of the metrics to be verified and cost effective. Achieving these goals are critical for specialty crops as produce-borne outbreaks and food recalls have caused serious public health problems and devastating economic impacts to individual businesses which extend across the produce industry.The key rationale behind this project is to provide a systems-based decision-support framework to evaluate measures for controlling pathogens on produce that will support an integrated view and decision-making roadmap for all vested parties.