The IFC Scan Guide: a practical assessment tool for everyone who is involved in developing, maintaining, or improving national food systems

Just a few weeks ago we celebrated World Food Safety Day 2022. This year the theme “Safer food, better health” demonstrates accurately the direct dependency of human health on the way food is grown, harvested, processed, and maintained at each stage of its “from farm to fork” journey.

There are hundred factors that could affect food safety. Positive and negative effects on food safety can be the result of the action or non-action of any player in the food value chain, from food producer to consumer. Therefore, well-thought, timely initiatives in relation to all aspects of food production is vital for the efficiency and operational functionality of any national food safety system. This includes operations on farm and firm levels, consumption of food at home, and rules that guide national food safety systems. The latter includes components like policy and regulatory frameworks, institutional structure, the way food safety control is arranged and performed in the country.

It is not difficult to identify if a national food safety system is efficient or not. The answer is always on the surface. However, when the system is not efficient, it might be challenging to identify why it is so. In some cases, the reason why a national food safety system doesn’t reach its main goals - protecting the health of consumers and ensuring fair practices in the food trade – is a lack of understanding by decision-makers and other stakeholders on how the system is built and how it operates. This statement might sound paradoxical, but practice shows that for many countries where food safety is an issue, it is a case.

IFC has been working on food safety for decades focusing on both the private and public sector. Understating of how a national food safety system operates is one of the pre-conditions for us when starting to develop a business strategy. Therefore, our experts spent hundreds of hours assessing different elements of national food systems in different parts of the world. One of the biggest challenges we faced the lack of an assessment tool that would allow us to identify critical stakeholders, understand the structure of the food safety control system, how and by whom it is managed, the connections between different agencies and stakeholders, how food production is regulated, and the basis for policy and regulatory frameworks and other issues that we need to know quickly.

To meet this demand IFC has developed the IFC Scan Guide: Policy and Regulatory Dimension of Food Safety, Food Fortification, Food Loss and Waste, and Livestock Production.

When working on the Scan Guide, the idea was not only to develop a tool that will allow users to assess elements of national food safety systems quickly with limited resources and answer questions of IFC investment teams on the efficiency of the system and perspectives for food industry development in a specific country, but also to develop it in a way that it could complement already existing assessment instruments like the food control system assessment tool developed by FAO in 2019, or a practical guide published in November 2021 by STDF, “Good regulatory practices to improve SPS measures.”

While the scope of assessment of a national food safety control system or the scope of assement of polices and regulations in the IFC Scan Guide is not so broad as it is suggested in the above-mentioned documents, its area of assessment is broader and covers food safety, food fortification, food loss and waster, and livestock production in parts related to animal welfare and use of antimicrobials.

You may learn more about why we decided to include mentioned sections in the Scan Guide, as well as how the Scan Guide is built and how it meets foreign and domestic food markets needs by watching the recording of a Virtual Launch of the IFC Scan Guide that we had on June 8th to celebrate World Food Safety Day 2022. To discuss the development of the Scan guide, IFC and WB activities in food safety area, as well as the importance of a One Health approach and interdependency between different elements of national food safety systems, we invited Prasad Gopalan, IFC Global Sector Manager of Agrobusiness and Forestry, Chris Brett, Lead Agribusiness Specialist in World Bank, Ivan Ivanov, IFC Global Sustainable Protein Advisory Lead, and Natia Mgeladze, Global Lead in IFC Food Safety Advisory.

In our team, we hope that the use of the IFC Scan Guide will let stakeholders in national food systems take a step back and look at the foodscape, and to recognize that food safety is the result of a complex succession of interrelated actions. Constant and transparent collaboration between all stakeholders is critical for the successful transformations meeting the needs of modern world and for better consumers protection.

The IFC Scan Guide, as well as other learning resources, including IFC Food Safety Handbook for food business, on-line training “Food Safety Reforms, Learning from the Best: The New Zealand Food Safety System in Case Studies” , and other IFC knowledge management products on food safety and related issues are available on our website.