New Delhi, Sep 27 : Proper regulation is crucial to enable the correct usage of antibiotics, enhance the safety of food, and fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR), said experts on Saturday. Speaking at the Global Food Regulators Summit 2025, an endeavour of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the experts spoke on various aspects of strengthening food safety systems and regulatory framework across the food value chain. “It’s a very important summit for food regulators, because food has to be safe in many different ways.
And one of the things is that all the problems we have are antimicrobial resistance, which is causing a lot of death within the human health sector. We need to be clear on to what extent our use of antibiotics in livestock may actually contribute to that,” Professor Anders Dalsgaard, Professor in veterinary public health at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, told . “Therefore, we need to set up regulatory programmes, working with farmers and the industry, so they can give and deliver the results, so antibiotics can be used prudently and correctly,” he added. Dr. Annie Rahman, CEO of Brunei Darussalam Food Authority, from the island nation Brunei, told that food safety has become a global issue, and it “is actually all about trust”. “Because food safety is a growing and dynamic sector, there are always new things to improve and a lot of collaboration also,” she added. Dr. Katerina Mastovska, Deputy Executive Director and Chief Science Officer, AOAC International, US, stressed the importance of understanding the role of advanced use of tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) or data analytics in food safety. “We definitely need to develop some guidelines on how to implement the AI tools in the food analysis and also how to utilise them to be more effective,” she told. Vincent Arbuckle, Speaker and Deputy Director-General of New Zealand Food Safety, lauded India for managing food safety on a large scale systematically. “We are a very small country of five and a half million, and you’re an enormous country, and the way that you manage food safety on scale with such diversity of cultures and one enormous country with an aspiration to grow your food exports, we can learn a lot from India,” Arbuckle told IANS.