On World Food Safety Day, I had the opportunity to celebrate the launch of a report, New directions for tackling food safety risks in the informal sector of developing countries, commissioned by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). A recording of the launch, including reactions from the international community, can be found here.

It’s clear that safer traditional markets are a critical access point to nutritious and affordable food, particularly in areas already vulnerable to malnutrition and food insecurity. Recognizing this, USAID has made informal or traditional markets a research focus, including the work done by the Feed the Future program Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food (EatSafe) to generate consumer demand and vendor capacity to provide safe, nutritious food in traditional markets. However, without proper capacity and regulations, the informal sector can pose foodborne disease risk. When consumers across the African continent access over 80 percent of their food from informal markets, action and investment become critical, so that access to safe, nutritious food is maintained even in the face of shocks and stressors, such as the global food crisis and climate change.

The ILRI report calls for multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder approaches to food safety in order to address the complex capacity- and incentive-related constraints of informal markets. To better understand the rationale of this report and examine how best to implement the recommended approaches, I sat down with the authors: Spencer Henson, Steven Jaffee and Shuo Wang.

Nika: What motivated you to undertake this work? 

Steven Jaffee: We perceived that two emerging strands of work related to domestic food safety in developing countries were not connecting with one another, lowering the relevance of one and the scalable impact of the other. One strand of work has focused on assessing and strengthening national (or central) food control capacities; the other strand has sought to improve food safety knowledge and the adoption of low-cost technologies within informal food distribution channels. We set out to identify some potential bridges between these two lines of work. We indeed found some, yet in somewhat unexpected places and ways.

Nika: What do you mean by unexpected places? 

Steven Jaffee: In most countries, traditional and informal grocers, market vendors and food service providers do not directly interact with the central government. Who do they interact with? Mostly officials at local or municipal government levels. This begs the question: can’t we leverage the growing number of urban food system governance and other programs to impact food safety? Unsafe food in the informal sector derives not only from knowledge and behavioral shortcomings but also from infrastructure deficiencies. Can’t we better leverage water, sanitation and hygiene and other urban infrastructure investments to improve food safety? In many places, multistakeholder platforms or institutions for collective action have been created to address food-related concerns or opportunities. Couldn’t these be better leveraged to tackle food safety problems on a larger scale? And, in terms of regulatory delivery, there is an opportunity to shift from burning bridges to creating them. In their contacts with informal food operators, at least some food safety officers could be deployed as extension agents, in turn promoting incremental improvements in practices, rather than as enforcement agents closing businesses, confiscating produce or issuing fines. Hence, there are four potential bridges: (i) city-level initiatives; (ii) multi-sectoral programs; (ii) multi-stakeholder platforms/collective action; and (iv) more supportive outreach (i.e. carrots) and fewer regulatory crackdowns (i.e. sticks).

Nika: Both the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization have recently released global food safety strategies towards 2030. Don’t these strategies chart the way forward in addressing the food safety challenges in the informal sector? 

Spencer Henson: These strategies have emerged from consultative processes and seem to represent state-of-the-art thinking among food safety professionals — on how best to apply sound science, emerging technologies and proven management systems to assess, manage and communicate food safety risks. We see the guidance and emphases of these strategies as being most relevant to high and upper middle-income countries whose food systems are mostly formalized and whose administrative structures and societal infrastructure are relatively strong. The aspirations laid out in these plans are also relevant for how low and lower middle-income countries could provide support and oversight for their larger, more formal, and export-oriented food enterprises. While these strategy documents do, very briefly, mention the distinctive and complex challenges related to food safety in the informal sector, there is little or nothing in their strategy planks for specifically targeting those challenges. Is there a belief that strengthened food control systems will eventually trickle down to reach the informal sector? Or, that these distinctive problems will simply fade out as food system formalization accelerates in these countries? We do not think either scenario is likely in the foreseeable future, but rather see a need for a strong complementary program of initiatives targeting unsafe food in the informal sector.

Nika: The report says that interventions should primarily be implemented at the municipal level. What does that look like in practice? 

Spencer Henson: In most countries, local government agencies or decentralized staff of national agencies already have mandates for managing public markets and interfacing with market and street vendors and small-scale food processors, animal abattoirs and food service businesses. What is typical, however, is that official aspirations vis-à-vis these players are low, as are the budgetary allocations for all programs or functions, whether related to providing advice, mobilizing stakeholders, enforcing regulations or upgrading infrastructure. With supplemental resources, and perhaps with technical guidance provided by central agencies or others, there is a wide menu of potential interventions which municipalities can undertake. Some might be dedicated food safety interventions, although many could aim to realize synergies across multiple goals: safer food, healthier diets, reduced food waste, improved sanitation, improved biosecurity, more efficient logistics, etc. Ideally, interventions would be sequenced according to multi-year plans and mainstreamed within overall urban planning, municipal budgeting, etc.

Nika: The ILRI report urges a holistic approach with interventions that are not “one size fits all.” Yet, how do we address challenges in scaling and sustaining these interventions? 

Steven Jaffee: We do see a need for tailoring the mix of interventions to match the types of informal food operators that are being targeted and the prevailing socio-economic, infrastructure and administrative conditions. This does not mean that every situation is unique, and that each city needs to invent its own wheel. There can be national programs for certain things but adapted and implemented locally. This is what is happening under the Eat Right India program, for example. There, a half-dozen national initiatives are being guided and supported from the center, yet applied, in a nuanced way, at the state and municipal levels. More generally, we anticipate that more and more guidelines for scalable and synergistic interventions will emerge from implementation experiences in the coming years. For example, some such guidelines could emerge from the localization initiatives targeting traditional markets in Ethiopia and Nigeria that are supported by EatSafe. Guidelines do exist for upgrading individual traditional markets. However, these provide little or no guidance to cities when it comes to positioning efforts to improve food safety into the overall management of public markets, including (re-)zoning, ongoing infrastructure investments, etc. Implementing and/or sustaining such interventions will really boil down to whether improvements in food safety within the informal sector, and facilitating its incremental formalization, are mainstreamed into the overall food system vision of cities. Sure, there are technical challenges, but the bigger ones — most relevant to scalability and sustainability — relate to municipal governance, understanding the lived reality of operators and how best to motivate changes in their behavior, and fitting the informal sector into the emerging collective visions of healthy, safe and resilient cities.

Nika: In undertaking this work, you also examined experiences and potential lessons learned from other sectors where informal enterprises are prominent and there are also health and/or environmental concerns. What did you find?

Shuo Wang: Indeed, we sought to find other areas where attempts have been made to induce behavioral changes on the part of micro-enterprises, either in relation to the safety of products, improving occupational health and safety or curbing negative environmental impacts. We looked at examples involving informal medicine sellers and players involved in pollution-intensive activities such as leather tanning, brick-making, etc. We found that in most cases a direct regulatory enforcement approach was not feasible. More effective approaches seem to have combined collective action and peer monitoring around certain codes of practice, re-enforced by support and/or pressures by community organizations. As we also see in relation to food safety, relatively low cost measures gain traction, while much higher cost ones have typically required heavy subsidies to induce adoption.