Experts meet to discuss food safety strategy for Kenya

A group of 12 Kenya-based food safety experts meet in Nairobi on Wednesday 28 July 2010 for a day-long workshop about food safety in Kenya’s livestock products. The meeting will prioritize the most important milk- and meat-borne diseases in Kenya, to contribute to formulation of a risk management strategy for animal-source foods.

Participants will be drawn from the Ministry of Livestock Development, the Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation, the Kenya Bureau of Standards, the Kenya Dairy Board, the University of Nairobi, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the GTZ program on Private Sector Development in Agriculture.

ILRI will be represented by Derek Baker and Kohei Makita from the Market Opportunities theme.

Key issues to be discussed include:

• Food safety laws and regulations;
• Public and private structures that relate to the animal-source food industry;
• Structure and organization of regulatory bodies; and
• Domestic livestock production and import and exports.

In addition, findings from a study on the contamination of beef carcasses with E. coli O157:H7 in three slaughterhouses in Nairobi will be presented, and approaches to risk management discussed.

The workshop takes place at GTZ Nairobi under the auspices of the Safe Food, Fair Food project currently underway in eight countries across East, West and Southern Africa. The project is funded by BMZ, Germany.

For more information, please contact Derek Baker (d.baker@cgiar.org) or visit the project website.