By Staff Reporter<\/p>\n
The National Biosafety Authority (NBA) says food safety is important and of public health significance.<\/p>\n
In a statement, NBA Registrar, Lackson Tonga emphasised the need for quality foods could not be over emphasized saying risk assessment was an essential tool in ensuring safe and healthy foods.<\/p>\n
\u201cFood safety is of public health importance and the NBA plays a big role in ensuring the safety of the public, animals and the environment. Our mandate is to regulate the import, export, transit, research and development, use and application involving genetically modified products,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cCurrently the stressful conditions due to various factors including climate change have resulted in human beings finding solutions to mitigate this and genetic modification has resulted into increased production of Genetically Modified foods\u201d.<\/p>\n
Tonga added that the foods cannot be consumed without undergoing risk assessment.<\/p>\n
\u201cSafe and nutritious food is key to sustaining life and promoting good health. If the food is not safe, it does not only pose a risk to the consumers but also the economy and the health care systems of a nation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
And Tonga said that the NBA was aware of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)\/ World Health Organization (WHO) Codex standards on Genetically Modified foods and was working towards incorporating those into guidelines.<\/p>\n
The first ever World\u00a0Food Day was adopted\u00a0by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2018\u00a0and will be\u00a0celebrated on 7 June 2019\u00a0under the theme food safety, everyone\u2019s business.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Staff Reporter The National Biosafety Authority (NBA) says food safety is important and of public health significance. In a statement, NBA Registrar, Lackson Tonga emphasised the need for quality foods could not be over emphasized saying risk assessment was an essential tool in ensuring safe and healthy foods. \u201cFood safety is of public health […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10187"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10189,"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10187\/revisions\/10189"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsdayzambia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}