ISO and FIL/IDF Standardization
The IDF/ISO Symposium, taking place in Rotterdam on 5 June 2013, will focus on the role of standardization in trade. Given the increasing global demand for milk and milk products, standardization is ever more important to ensure food safety, food quality and fairness in international trade.
Standards are integral to ensuring safe and fair trade, as well as providing certain economic advantages. “Standards are gaining a higher profile in trade, and a large volume of unglamorous but essential work in the WTO deals with this,” says Bernard Kuiten, Head of External Relations, World Trade Organization (WTO) who will be moderating the event. “Governments want to ensure traded products are safe or simply convenient for their consumers and producers to use. But standards can be also an excuse to be protectionist. They should therefore be crafted in a way that boosts trade by raising market confidence in the goods and services traded.”
A great deal of collaboration is necessary between the international organizations involved in setting standards. This enhances harmonization and avoids duplication of work, increasing efficiency and simplifying matters for the end user. The Symposium with high-level speakers from ISO, Codex Alimentarius and the dairy industry will further demonstrate this spirit of collaboration, providing an opportunity for speakers and participants to hear expert views and share experiences on the development and use of international standards.
IDF and ISO have a long history of collaboration through a joint programme of work on methods of analysis and sampling for milk and milk products. In June 2012, AOAC INTERNATIONAL and ISO signed a collaboration agreement regarding methods for infant formula and adult nutritionals with involvement of IDF, leading to a presentation on harmonization during the Symposium.
Representing the global dairy sector, ensuring that standards best address the needs of the dairy sector for the fair trade of safe, high quality milk and milk products is an important aspect of IDF’s analytical programme of work. Collaboration is again at the heart of this activity, as Dr. Jaap Evers, Chair of the IDF Methods Standards Steering Group explains: “IDF has a strategic objective to foster mutually beneficial partnerships with other organizations. Hence, IDF will continue to focus strongly on building synergistic collaborations with other international standardization organizations to deliver standards-based solutions that facilitate the international flow of dairy nutrition.”
“Our long-standing cooperation with IDF supports the ISO Strategic Plan 2011-2015 objective of “fostering partnerships that further increase the value and efficient development of International Standards” and our connection with IDF helps ensure the relevance of our work to the global dairy industry and research community. We are looking forward to a successful IDF/ISO symposium”.
