GAIN Discussion Paper Series 16 - Nutritious and Safe Food for All


Foodborne disease is a major global health challenge, causing millions of illnesses every year – mostly in low- and middle-income countries – and hindering achievement of other global goals, such as improved nutrition. Since contamination of food can happen at any point ‘from farm to fork’, reducing the burden of foodborne illness requires a whole-of-food-system approach: one that considers all actors and activities that play a role in production, processing, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food. The objective of this paper is to discuss how to enact such a food system approach to food safety, with a focus on LMICs. We describe entry points for food safety actions across the food system. We do this by drawing on the scientific literature on food safety as well as the programmatic experiences of GAIN, aiming to provide actionable examples of how food safety can be integrated into nutrition programming – as well as to help guide new directions for such integrated programming in the future.