Launched in July 2021 and funded under the EU Aid Programme for the Turkish Cypriot community, the EU Food Safety Project (EU FSP) supports efforts to improve food safety, animal health, and disease crisis preparedness in the northern part of Cyprus.
The project aims to promote the development of a safer, more resilient agri-food chain by enhancing public health protection, supporting environmental sustainability, and increasing the preparedness and response capacity to transboundary animal diseases.
Project Scope and Beneficiaries
The primary beneficiary of the project is the Turkish Cypriot community, including a broad range of stakeholders:
- Primary producers (farmers, breeders)
- food business operators (dairy, meat, poultry, honey producers)
- Veterinary and health-related local bodies
- Testing laboratories
- Chambers of commerce and NGOs
- Consumers
PURPOSES: The purposes of this contract (Implementation periods 5/2021-5/2024 and 5/5024-5/2027) are as follows:- To improve consumers’ and food business operators’ awareness and knowledge on food safety risks and prevention, so that food business operators are capable to exercise their roles and responsibilities in ensuring safety of products they produce.
- To increase consumers’ demand for safe food and the ability of food business operators and local bodies to deliver according to the consumer’s demand.
- To reinforce cross-sectoral communication and coordination in order to ensure effective implementation of annual/multiannual control and monitoring programmes along the food chain.
- To place a system ensuring required information on food business operators and data collection for food safety risk assessment, planning of risk-based controls and achievement of traceability objective.
- To increase awareness, capacitate own-checks, controls and verifications of compliance along the food chain, including effective programmes for monitoring of zoonosis, zoonotic agents, residues, antimicrobial resistance, and enforcement, leading to progressive reduction of occurrence of foodborne zoonosis and antimicrobial resistance.
- To increase awareness, controls and enforcements in order to ensure progressive reduction of use of veterinary medicines in food producing animals.
- To engage food business operators’ participation in schemes (such as “milk channelling” scheme) which increase market opportunities for their products and overall resilience of their businesses.
- To ensure local bodies and interested stakeholders are prepared and capable to effectively implement disease emergency/response measures at the initial stage of any outbreak of an exotic animal disease and effectively manage disease crisis.
While Implementation period 5/2021-5/2024 of the project has focused on animal origin food, for Implementation period 5/2024-5/2027 specific tasks as regarding processed food including of animal and non-animal origin are added.