Towards a Pilot ASEAN Rapid Alert System for Food (ARASF)

1) Initial discussions

On 29-30 June 2005, the European Commission Regional Adviser on Health and Food Safety invited the representatives of four ASEAN countries (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam) to a meeting in Bangkok, to present and demonstrate the EU Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF). The representatives of the four ASEAN countries felt that the RASFF was a powerful tool for the effective management of market surveillance and to inform food safety policy and legislation. The opportunity of establishing a Pilot ASEAN Rapid Alert System for Food was considered. It was felt that implications in terms of resources, interface with existing systems, organization of national food safety services, disclosure and confidentiality, notably, needed further consideration. It was agreed that other ASEAN countries should be kept informed and should be offered to join the project, either as participants or as observers.

On the occasion of his visit to South-East Asia in November 2005, Mr Markos Kyprianou, the EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, was asked by the Ministers of Agriculture of both Vietnam and Thailand to provide technical assistance to ASEAN countries for the purpose of establishing a rapid alert system amongst countries in the Region.

The proposal to set up a Pilot ASEAN Rapid Alert System for Food (ARASF) was further considered at a Meeting of Experts on ASEAN Food Control Policies held in Bangkok on 13-14 December 2005 as an activity of the Food sub-programme of the EC-ASEAN Economic Cooperation Programme on Standards, Quality and Conformity Assessment. At that meeting, the European Commission Regional Adviser on Health and Food Safety undertook to investigate the possibility of providing EU technical assistance for setting up the Pilot ARASF.

In further contacts between the European Commission Regional Adviser on Health and Food Safety and the Food Control Authorities of several ASEAN countries (including: Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, The Philippines and Vietnam), some of the latter indicated that they were also interested in setting up a national rapid system which could then be linked up with similar systems in other countries to form a regional rapid alert system.

On the basis of these discussions, the European Commission is presently taking the following initiatives with a view to support the establishment of national and/or regional rapid alert systems in ASEAN.

2) EU technical assistance to ASEAN in 2007 on rapid alert systems

a) IT tools

DG SANCO will supply to any interested ASEAN member country practical model and information platform including software used in the RASFF to be further adjusted and simplified to the needs of a national or regional rapid alert system.

The current IT set-up of the RASFF system is e-mail based. It consists of functional e-mail boxes sending e-mail to a central mailbox at the European Commission. This mailbox is managed by a Microsoft Exchange Server with a client Microsoft Outlook 2003 running it. The emails contain notification forms (in Microsoft Word) based on a template and attached documents (usually binary scanned documents).

Custom forms have been designed with added custom fields. The database contains important elements of the notifications received allowing the creation of cover pages, and diverse reports and statistics as well as a search tool to find notifications based on a large set of parameters. The database also contains hyperlinks to a notification created in PDF that collates the notification form and related documents. This PDF document is uploaded onto a secure web site that serves as a library but that is also configured to distribute the notification to the users of the RASFF system. When a new notification is uploaded to this site, the site notifies all subscribed users by e-mail that a new document was uploaded and attaches the PDF file to the notification email (if that option is activated).

b) Operational assistance to Pilot ASEAN Rapid Alert System for Food (ARASF)  

In order to assist the ASEAN countries in setting-up a Pilot ASEAN Rapid Alert System, the Delegation of the European Commission to Thailand, under the EU-Thailand Economic Co-operation Small Projects Facility (SPF), provide specific technical assistance to ACFS, the National Bureau of Agricultural Commodity and Food Standards of the Thai Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives. This technical assistance consists of:

c) Training

As part of its “Better Training for Safer Food” programme, the Health and Consumer protection Directorate General (DG SANCO) of the European Commission is organizing a workshop in June 2007 in Bangkok (training course) on the EU Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and the possible introduction of similar systems in ASEAN.