rationale

OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT
AND STATE OF THE ART

European consumers remember food safety and health crises encountered in the past (BSE, foot and mouth disease, Listeria, dioxin, growth hormone contaminated by Creutzfeld-Jacob prions, etc). In parallel, the demand for high quality food and feed products is increasing, as exemplified by the general growth of high quality products (e.g.; protected designation of origin) resulting in an increase in the number of such products and their growing market volume.

As a result of such food and feed safety concerns and quality requests, food and feed traceability and labelling and related analytical methods are becoming more and more important within the European Union.

After a period of case-by-case regulation and European directives and research programmes (e.g. with the 258/97 regulation on novel foods and ingredients) the EU attempted to fill in the gaps between the several disparate directives and regulations by the publication of the general food law 178/02 regulation that entered in force in January 2005. As usual in this case, there is a large gap between a regulatory request and its practical implementation, particularly for SMEs.

Concomitantly the number of research programmes on the traceability and labelling in the EU increased. The projects in which the partners of this consortium are involved (See Table 1), represent an investment in aspects of traceability of €114M in Framework 5 and 6 Programmes and involve over 300 participants across Europe. But such programmes are, in our opinion, operating in a disparate manner due to a reliance on the annual budgets and the lack of cooperation between scientists in different research fields. Globally, due to differing timescales, different scientific focus and/or commodity driven programmes, there is a real danger that work will be carried out in isolation, resulting in duplication of effort with concomitant waste of resource. For example, traceability and decision support systems are being developed to differing degrees in several projects so a degree of harmonisation and/or cross fertilisation of approach is required to ensure the developed systems are comparable to ensure global traceability goals can be realised.

Finally the lack of a SUPER-SUPER-coordinator, able to summarise the results, guidelines etc of all of the launched traceability research programmes impedes the possibility of European countries having an overall and workable view of the entire situation. This work cannot be achieved by the EC's personnel in charge of the research programmes or the scientists due to the lack of time. The scientists belong to several research fields and thus cannot cover all aspects of traceability and related methods.

Because of this lack of a high level overseeing body, the scientists of this consortium see a need to launch a programme able to develop and provide the EU with a complete and workable overview all European traceability measures and programmes.

According to the several deficiencies and gaps identified above, the purpose of PETER, a kind of META-programme on traceability is therefore to harmonise the points of common interest, tools, content, and strategies of several research programmes through the involvement of their coordinators. In addition, it will consider previous and new programmes on traceability. There is a clear need to establish a platform for focusing the key traceability aspects of these research projects and related industrial partners in order to:

  • Increase inter project dialogue and cooperation
  • Maximise the impact of European Food Traceability Research
  • Minimise the duplication of effort
  • Reduce fragmentation and ensure the Food Priority's strategic goals on food traceability are met
  • Achieve coherent and coordinated dissemination at European and global level
  • Provide platforms for initial intergovernmental and interagency discussion
  • Facilitate technology transfer to the industrial sector

PETER will fulfil this need.