The meeting was officially opened by Dr Berhe Tekola, Director of the FAO Animal Production & Health Division, who welcomed delegates and highlighted the importance of private partnerships to support the FAO strategic goals to the IFIF delegates representing over 80% of global compound feed production.
Mr Joel Newman, IFIF Chairman, reiterated IFIF’s commitment to this longstanding partnership and highlighted that “together with the dedicated colleagues at the FAO we have achieved very important milestones, including the Feed Manual of Good Practices for the Feed Industry, the International Feed Regulators Meetings (IFRM) and the Global Feed & Food (GFFC) Congress Series.”
Mr Newman added that “our joint meeting underlined that IFIF is committed to continue to support the FAO initiatives on capacity development for feed safety, the LEAP partnership and the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock, as well joint efforts on feed and food safety at the Codex Alimentarius. IFIF looks forward to our upcoming FAO IFIF 10th International Feed Regulators Meeting (IFRM) in Atlanta, USA, in January 2017, which is another great example of FAO IFIF collaboration positively impacting the feed & food chain.”
Daniela Battaglia, Livestock Development Officer at the Animal Production and Health Division of the FAO, said “FAO and IFIF have a long standing partnership and this meeting addressed a number of critical issues of common interest, such as the need for capacity development to ensure feed safety and the importance of collaborating to tackle the issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). FAO is committed to work with the private sector and feed operators and believes that they can valuably contribute to make the livestock and food sectors more responsible and sustainable to achieve important goals such as public health, and animal health and welfare.”
Ruud Tijssens, FEFAC President and IFIF board member, presented the IFIF Global feed LCA data base project, which is an essential component of the FAO LEAP Environmental impact assessment methodology. The public feed LCA database will allow globally harmonised measurements of feed related environmental impacts. Two regional database projects under GFLI have already been launched in the EU and North-America. GFLI welcome further regional and sectoral database projects (e.g. China, Latin America, aquafeed, premixtures & Feed additives etc.), to ensure that secondary quality LCA data for processed feed ingredients from all world regions and used in different livestock production systems become available, thus strengthening the robustness of the LEAP Feed LCA methodology, which should become the global reference for any future LCA calculation tool in the feed and livestock sector.