Dear Paroma Arefin.

I am afraid that for our developing countries, critical challenges are included in every single step of the production chain.

For example, It is so difficult to control the presence of highly toxic pesticide residues, dangerous microorganisms, antibiotics or heavy metals in our raw food materials. During processing, the implementation of microbiological controls in a GMP or HACCP program are basically beyond the question because of insufficient or inadequate plant conditions and infrastructure, safe water, staff training, modern technologies for quality assurance, packaging operations and standard sanitizing procedures, just to mention a few reasons.

From the market point of view and because of the relatively limited purchasing power of our consumers, people tend to give more importance to the price of the final products than to its quality and safety, so pressure on producers to improve their product, processes and complementary operations in terms and for the sake of safety is rather low and weak.

Climatological conditions such as high temperatures and humidity all year round do not help either and they rather contribute to the propagation of dangerous bacteria, fungi and animal pests into the different steps of the agroindustrial chains.

In addition to all the reasons above mentioned, I am absolutely convinced that more education on food safety for the civil population might be the clue to success in food safety assurance, and that precisely turns out to be the toughest challenge for our developing countries, not only on the production side but especially on the consumer's side mainly constituted by our impoverished civil populations.

I hope this analysis helps.

Best regards from Costa Rica.

Thanks. It is really helpful. @Maynor Alberto Vargas

Thanks Carole C Tranchant. The discussion is really helpful

Dear Paroma,

There are several food safety challenges in developing countries.The food processing plants do not strictly observe the rules of hygiene and sanitation. There is lack of facilities of cold storage to keep the food.There is no critical microbiological monitoring of foods. Also, industries do not meet the microbiological specifications of foods. The employees do not usually follow the rules of food hygiene.

With best wishes,

Prof.Dr.Mahendra Pal

Dear Paroma,

I think that environmental pollution, storage condition and worker sanitary is the most food safety problems, regards.

Thanks @Mahendra Pal sir and @Zaid Khalaf Khidhir sir

The culture of both employees and employers and lack of training. Additionally lack of desire to enforce food safety law and regulation.

Cold chain management is weak

In Nigeria, food scientists and government regulators are currently wrestling with food safety issues. The hygiene of street food vending services top the list of food safety challenges in Nigeria, as over 40% of working Nigerians patronize these unhygienic (often mobile) food outlets that sell cheaper and more easily accessible ready-to-eat foods.

Also, the challenges outline by @Mahendra, @Zaid and @Maynor equally hold in Nigeria, in addition to weak capability of the food standards regulators to properly and adequately monitor the food industry players

Dear Paroma, the many challanges of food safety in our country are firstly the procedure of livestock production that is not follow the healty standards especially in country sides. Secondly, sometimes the venues to process to become the food products are not satisfy the standards as we have, that is, Indonesia National Standard, especialy in rural areas. Those are so many to discuss.....

Dear Paroma,

Over-exploitation of limited resources to provide the ever-increasing food demand is one of the major challenges in global food safety, specially in developing countries.

A solution to this challenge is seeking to integrate food production cycles. Doing so will provide the opportunity to produce more food with less resource damage and exploitation.

Aquaponics are one of the leading systems in this context, in which seafood and vegetables are produced in a symbiotic setup. For further information regarding the state of the art of aquaponics, please take a look at our recently published papaer:

Article Sustainable Seafood and Vegetable Production: Aquaponics as ...

Hope you find it helpful,

Best,

Ramin

THE TWO BIGGEST ARE CLEAN WATER AND REFRIGERATION. TRAINING AND OPERATING PROCEDURES CAN COME NEXT.

Dear Paroma,

In addition to views of the experts earlier, value chain development of food and food products integrated with food safety issues addressing one health is one of the major challenges. When I say this, it includes everything from farm-to-fork.

Best wishes!

It is underlined in the following points :

1. Personal hygiene

2. Cold chain control measures

3. Processing Internal Monitoring and audits procedures

4. Cold Storage conditions

personal hygiene and temperature control measure and good storage condition

An effort to depict the challenges through pictures.