Proper regulation key for correct antibiotic use, boost food safety and fight AMR: Experts

New Delhi, Sep 27 (IANS/WISHAVWARTA) Proper regulation is crucial to enable the correct usage of antibiotics, enhance the safety of food, and fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR), said experts on Saturday.

Speaking at the Global Food Regulators Summit 2025, an endeavour of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the experts spoke on various aspects of strengthening food safety systems and regulatory framework across the food value chain.

“It’s a very important summit for food regulators, because food has to be safe in many different ways. And one of the things is that all the problems we have are antimicrobial resistance, which is causing a lot of death within the human health sector. We need to be clear on to what extent our use of antibiotics in livestock may actually contribute to that,” Professor Anders Dalsgaard, Professor in veterinary public health at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, told IANS.

“Therefore, we need to set up regulatory programmes, working with farmers and the industry, so they can give and deliver the results, so antibiotics can be used prudently and correctly,” he added.

Dr. Annie Rahman, CEO of Brunei Darussalam Food Authority, from the island nation Brunei, told IANS that food safety has become a global issue, and it “is actually all about trust”.

“Because food safety is a growing and dynamic sector, there are always new things to improve and a lot of collaboration also,” she added.

Dr. Katerina Mastovska, Deputy Executive Director and Chief Science Officer, AOAC International, US, stressed the importance of understanding the role of advanced use of tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) or data analytics in food safety.

“We definitely need to develop some guidelines on how to implement the AI tools in the food analysis and also how to utilise them to be more effective,” she told IANS.

Vincent Arbuckle, Speaker and Deputy Director-General of New Zealand Food Safety, lauded India for managing food safety on a large scale systematically.

“We are a very small country of five and a half million, and you’re an enormous country, and the way that you manage food safety on scale with such diversity of cultures and one enormous country with an aspiration to grow your food exports, we can learn a lot from India,” Arbuckle told IANS.

Kofi Essuman, World Packaging Organization (WPO), Austria, spoke on the need to adopt digital technologies for better food safety.

“It’s really coming out strongly that in this era of digitalisation and artificial intelligence, machine learning, we need to change our approach to food regulation by adopting a lot of digital technologies,” Essuman told IANS.

He also raised the importance of proper packaging in ensuring food safety, while stressing the need for judicious use of plastic to avoid food contamination as well as its proper disposal to avoid harm to the environment.

Meanwhile, Angshu Mallick, Managing Director & CEO, AWL Agri Business, speaking at an event in Delhi, stressed the importance of the traditional method of Indian cooking and food. He also called for increasing our own production of edible oil.

“In edible oil, we import 60 per cent. We need to increase our own production. For this, we will start a mustard model farm,” he told IANS.

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