Food Standards Agency launches new five-year strategy

2022-0064

The Food Standards Agency has today published its strategy for improving food over the next five years and recommitted to its mission of food you can trust.

The five-year strategy reflects the FSA’s greater responsibilities now that the UK is outside of the EU and takes into account growing public concern about health and climate change.

The strategy includes a section on animal feed which gives a tentative indication of future policy priorities. The section reads:

Feed delivery programme

The FSA is responsible for commissioning the delivery of feed Official Controls through local authority partners. The UK’s departure from the EU along with the need for the feed sector to contribute to sustainable food production has created the environment for a swiftly changing landscape in feed supply chains. For example, there have been developments in the use of insect proteins and feed additive applications, which their developers hope will have positive environmental impacts.

The FSA has a role to play to ensure that feed regulation is sufficiently agile to respond to the fast pace of innovation.

We will work with our stakeholders to ensure safety and continued public health protection.

We will support our local authority delivery partners by:

● Making best use of the capability and capacity of enforcement partners.

● Developing tools and mechanisms to speed up the identification of feed imports, thereby focusing resource on matters of most impact.

● Updating our Official Control directions and guidance to provide timely clarity where fast paced developments require this

ENDS

AIC shares the FSA’s view that EU exit, coupled with the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, has resulted in both challenges and change for feed supply chains. At the same time, AIC recognises the opportunities for the industry to secure safe and sustainable protein streams from existing and novel sources, which could help contribute to the net zero ambitions of the UK livestock sector.

AIC welcomes the statement that ‘FSA has a role to play to ensure that feed regulation is sufficiently agile to respond to the fast pace of innovation’ and we look forward to engaging with FSA in helping to develop new regulation in the area of feed materials as well as regulated products such as feed additives and GMOs.

AIC recognises that those performing official controls should have sufficient resource to carry out their roles in a way that does not disrupt feed supply chains, particularly when dealing with imported feeds and feed materials. This will become extremely important when full controls are applied later in 2022.