Human & Veterinary Respiratory Physilogy_DR.E.Muralinath_Associate Professor....
Consumers do care! Incentivizing food safety through a market-based pull–push approach
1. Consumers do care! Incentivizing food safety
through a market-based pull–push approach
Kristina Roesel, Marcel Zwietering, Coen van Wagenberg, Arie Havelaar, Silvia Alonso, Ralph Roothaert,
Gemma Tacken, Ruerd Ruben, Kebede Amenu, Laurencia Ouattara, Johanna Lindahl, Srinivasan Ramasamy,
Michelle Danyluk, Michel Dione, Yitagele Terefe, Tadesse Guadu, Vianney Tarpaga, Daniel Kaboré, Birhanu
Megersa Lenjiso, and Delia Grace Randolph
International Food Safety Conference
Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya
22 May 2019
2. Background
Animal source foods in SSA
• important for human nutrition
• production and processing give
jobs to millions
• single most important cause of
(zoonotic) foodborne diseases
(FBD)
• Previous efforts to control FBD
focused at primary production
• This neglects risk of cross-
contamination closer to the
consumer
Havelaar et al., 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001923
Foods implicated according to FERG (WHO, 2017)
4. Gaps in understanding how to manage
food safety in informal markets
Where to intervene?
Intervention on farm
Intervention at market
How to intervene?
Technological
(i.e. Petrifilms, tippy taps, disinfectant, mazzi cans)
Institutional
(i.e. Training and certification programs, dairy
cooperatives, butcher associations)
Technically effective?
Contribution to
improved food safety
and nutrition?
Cost-effective? Will people take up the
intervention?
How many beneficiaries
do we reach?
5. Pull approach (demand for safe food) Push approach (supply of safe food)
Reduced burden of foodborne diseases,
professionalizing informal sector,
appropriate governance
ENABLING
ENVIRONMENT
Consumers recognize &
demand safer food
VC actors respond to
demand & incentives
Inform, monitor &
legitimize VC actors
(Primary Outcome 2)
Build capacity &
motivation of regulators
(Primary Outcome 1)
Consumer campaign for
empowered consumers
(Primary Outcome 3)
Gather baseline information for detailed intervention planning and advocacy
Pull–push approach at the market-level
6. New ILRI project
Ouagadougou,
Burkina Faso
Harar/Dire Dawa,
Ethiopia
01/2019-10/2022
4.6m US$
Urban food markets in Africa
Incentivizing food safety: the pull–push
7. Purpose
To help to sustainably reduce the
burden of foodborne disease
in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso
by building capacity of food chain
actors and regulators to cost-effectively
mitigate important food safety risks in
poultry meat and vegetable value chains
and provide incentives for them to do so by
harnessing consumer demand for food
safety.
Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter spp.
Salmonella spp. and enterotoxigenic E. coli
8. Pull approach (demand for safe food) Push approach (supply of safe food)
Reduced burden of foodborne diseases,
professionalizing informal sector,
appropriate governance
ENABLING
ENVIRONMENT
Consumers recognize &
demand safer food
VC actors respond to
demand & incentives
Inform, monitor &
legitimize VC actors
(Primary Outcome 2)
Build capacity &
motivation of regulators
(Primary Outcome 1)
Consumer campaign for
empowered consumers
(Primary Outcome 3)
Gather baseline information for detailed intervention planning and advocacy
Key
innovation
Pull–push approach at the market-level
9. 1. Estimating
burden and cost
of foodborne
illness
2. Understanding poultry
meat and vegetable value
chains (including focus
hazard levels)
3. Quantitative risk
assessment and cost-
effectiveness analysis of
candidate interventions
5. Design and
implement a
consumer campaign
6. Empower value
chain actors to
manage food safety
4. Build capacity and
motivation of
regulators to manage
food safety
7. Impact assessment of pull–push intervention
10. Expected results
• Measurably safer food
(significant improvement of hygiene indicators at the retailer level)
• Measurable improvements in knowledge
and practices among regulators, value chain
actors and consumers
* ASF are important for human nutrition and their production and processing give jobs to millions – in Africa especially in the informal markets
* But they are also the single most important cause of (zoonotic) foodborne diseases (FBD) – the burden of FBD was quantified for the first time in 2015 and estimated in the same order of magnitude as TB, malaria or HIV/Aids
Previous efforts to control FBD focused at primary production = animal reservoir/host of diseases (example: how to prevent mastitis etc.)
This neglects risk of cross-contamination closer to the consumer who is the one suffering from the FBD – but the consumers, especially in the cities, are far from the primary producer
See the example of milk bulking: milk collectors go around farms and collect small amounts of milk which is then pooled (aggregation)
Most of the farmers may have good quality milk but if one farmer has a cow with S. aureus mastitis, this can spoil the entire batch
Depending on storage conditions and time of bulking until sale (disaggregation) the S. aureus may have significantly multiplied
It is also possible that all the milk collected is clean but then at bulking, a milk handler contaminates the bulk milk because of poor hygienic practices
So focusing interventions on farm only are not the “silver bullet” solution
WHERE TO INTERVENE: Before we plan an intervention we analyse the problem and identify the CCP (= understand the supply chain, look where the pathogen is introduced and where it can be controlled best)
HOW TO INTERVENE: Then we think about how to best address the CCP. This could be by introducing a new technology or organizing a group of people at this CCP.
THE CLOUDS (animated): For one intervention to work, many things need to happen. We need to evaluate which of the candidate interventions are effective in reducing food borne pathogens, but also if it is affordable, how many many beneficiaries we reach, if it helps reducing the risk (if the meat is tainted with germs but thoroughly cooked it is no risk and no need to eliminate all pathogens from the meat (although it would be great), but if the cutting board for the contaminated meat is also used to chop the tomatoes and onions for kacumbari, we must do something)
But lastly, if the food retailer/milk kiosk owner/butcher/hotel owner introduces a new technology, they want to make sure it pays. This could happen through customers paying more or having more customers.
But to get customers to pay more or to attract more customers, these customers need to understand food safety. They need to understand that foods can cause foodborne diseases and how to prevent them at home. But they must also learn how to tell a food handler with good practices from one with poor practices, or a safe food product from an unsafe one. If they have the power to differentiate they can demand behavior change from the food retailer.
To enable the food retailer now to respond to this new demand, he/she needs to have access to these new technologies, to knowledge, to clean water/electricity/toilets… which should ideally provided by regulating bodies.
FBD is disproportionately urban, as a result of greater complexity of value chains and the distances between production and consumption (Grace, 2015).
That is why our new project focuses on urban food markets: in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso / as well as the cities of Harar and Dire Dawa in northeast Ethiopia
Leveraging the consumer demand is our key innovation.
Most improvements in food safety have been driven by consumer demand and not public health supply.
Previous studies have shown that even poor consumers do care about the safety of their food but have no alternatives in the market or little power to demand for safer food.
Due to improved welfare and education, consumers in LMICs increasingly care about food safety (World Bank, 2017; Roesel & Grace, 2014). Examples:
In Uganda, while butchers thought that "flies on meat are not worrying the African consumer", 75% of the consumers in the same markets were concerned (Heilmann, 2016).
Economic studies have found a high willingness to pay for safer food (summarised in Grace et al., 2018).
Consumers stop buying food perceived to be unsafe (for example, in Vietnam, more than 50% of consumers responded to pig disease outbreaks by switching to poultry or shifting their purchasing to supermarkets which they (incorrectly) perceived to be more safe (Lapar et al., 2010).
Consumers apply heuristics and experience to attempt to identify suppliers of safe, clean food. For example, in Ghana, consumers reduce health risks by trusting only food vendors with neat appearance and visually clean food (Olsen, 2006).
However, little is known on how this demand for safety can lead to improvement of VCs.
The project is organized in 7 work packages led by the different partners
Blue boxes = understanding the problem
Red boxes = interventions:
capacity building on food safety management of regulators (PUSH)
capacity building on food safety management of consumers (PULL)
capacity building on food safety management of consumers value chain actors (PUSH)
Green box = impact assessment
Research questions behind the boxes (no need to explain in detail but perhaps you want to mention a few)
Blue boxes = understanding the problem
What is the health and economic burden to the industry and public from selected priority hazards present in poultry meat and vegetable VCs and consumed in urban centres in Burkina Faso and Ethiopia?
How are these burdens distributed?
How does disaggregated information on burden influence regulator attitude and behaviour?
What are the most relevant and cost-effective risk management options for priority hazards in targeted VCs, in each country?
What are perceived barriers and enablers to urban VC actors providing safer food?
What are perceived barriers for urban consumers in consuming safer food?
Red boxes = interventions
What consumer communication strategy can be used to leverage urban consumer demand for food safety into behaviour change among regulators, VC actors and consumers?
How important is food safety for urban consumers when buying at local markets?
Can building capacity in risk-based approaches and use of decision support tools improve the ability of regulators to manage food safety?
Can a package of simple and cheap information, technologies, and organisational mechanisms, alongside incentives (consumer demand and regulatory oversight) empower VC actors to respond to consumer demand and regulator pressure by improving their hygienic practices?
Green box = impact assessment
Does behavior of regulators, consumers and vc actors change due to our interventions?
Does the level of exposure of urban consumers to foodborne disease go down due to our interventions?