Food safety is a fundamental component of food security: According to the Rome declaration of the World Food Submit “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (FAO, 1996). Food safety and security are intrinsically linked with the safety and availability of water, a crucial input into production of food, both pre and post harvest. Moreover food and water safety affect the livelihoods of poor producers and consumers through two major channels: health and market access.

The Food and Water Safety research team at IFPRI suggests that poverty cannot be reduced and health and nutrition outcomes cannot be improved without investing research efforts that improve policymakers’ understanding of:

• The impacts of production and consumption of unsafe food and water on the livelihoods of the poor;
• The role of food and water safety in food security, and the potential trade-offs between food safety and security;
• The impacts of food safety standards on the poor’s access to markets, and hence on their livelihoods;
• The efficient and effective institutional mechanisms that can facilitate poor producers to appropriate the benefits of producing safe food (e.g., certification) as well as those that can facilitate poor producers’ access to markets (e.g., cooperatives, contracts);
• The cost-effective control strategies that can be undertaken by both poor producers and consumers to minimize food and water safety risks;
• The effective and efficient methods of communication and information sharing regarding food and water safety risks and strategies to minimize these.

The principal goal of this research sub-theme is to provide evidence-based information on the cost-effectiveness of risk control technologies to reduce the food and water safety hazards, including plant and animal health concerns, in developing countries; to understand the constraints to the adoption of these technologies and to recommend solutions for amelioration of these constraints. By doing so it is expected that cost-effective risk reducing strategies can be implemented to minimize the health risks and to improve the market access of the poor.