COST

·Food Safety.  Modern day life has brought an increased range of hazards to health that are related to food.  From food hygiene in family kitchens to the global and complex networks of agricultural and processed food production that give rise to threats that need assessing and managing. This needs to be done against the background of increased public perception of risk.  Some data are available, but also many data gaps, particularly in relation to chemical and microbiological hazards, so there is considerable need for expert judgement to assess the risks and the effect of potential mitigation strategies

·Food Security.  The food system is global, multifaceted and influenced by an huge number of public and private actions and uncontrolled factors such as weather and climate, leading to a great deal of uncertainty about how any policy decision or strategy will play out. Food security is very far from a simple supply and demand problem: government policy, food cultures, social justice; wars, corruption, the nexus with water security and energy security are all implicated in a failure to allow everyone secure access to food adequate for an active and healthy life. This multifaceted, heterogeneous system requires the judgements from different panels of experts in diverse disciplines including insight about factors elevating the risk to food security of households, judgements about the effects of malnutrition on the population, estimates of the availability of food in the market and forecasts of crop yield in a particular season. Information that is currently available to inform each element of the system is patchy. Some parts of the system are well modelled and informed by models and rich datasets, whilst expert judgement alone is required for other parts. This expert information may be subject to confounding. There is considerable uncertainty about world food availability since food trade and prices are highly variable and can be affected by a large number of factors such as climate, wars, international relations, and even by another country's internal financial regulations. Furthermore, growing populations and movement towards western diets mean that current food production systems will not meet expected future demand.  Thus there are severe threats to our ability to feed ourselves at local, regional, national and global levels. Data availability and the complexity of the issues mean that, inevitably, many forecasts and models of food security issues rely substantially on expert judgement.