Making food an opportunity

Food has become too much a matter of crisis and not of opportunity, says Michel Vieillefosse, head of the Eureka Secretariat.

Writing in the latest edition of Eureka News magazine, which focuses on food technologies and safety, Vieillefosse recalls how the sophistication of technologies in providing safe, high quality produce has grown over the last decade following a spate of contamination scares in the nineties and a crisis of consumer confidence.

Eureka, which supports the competitiveness of European companies through international collaboration, has played a vital part in enabling monitoring and control technologies to be swiftly developed and out on the market to meet the growing demands in quality control throughout the food chain, from detecting GM matter in baby food or safely and cost effectively disposing of BSE contaminated waste, Vieillefosse says.

The challenges presented in the field of food go beyond monitoring and quality control. Eureka projects span horticulture and crop production technology; animal selection, production and husbandry, genetic engineering, packaging, transportation and distribution, microbiology, and biocontrol.

Biotechnology has opened a vast new field of exploration into new modes of agricultural production and foods with a health benefit in addition to the physiological value of the nutrients they contain.

Vieillefosse claims that the commercial success that Eureka has seen in developing close-to-market research and bringing the results to market is based on the quick start of its projects and in marrying the commercial and managerial know-how of large companies with the brains of smaller SMEs. "We must continue to provide a favourable basis for large companies to stay in Europe to safeguard and further develop Europe's market share in the agricultural and food industry," he insists.