The country's Plant Production Inspection Centre, National Food Agency, provincial governments and municipal food control authorities will work together to verify enforcement of rules on vegetables, fruits and wild products in particular.
According to the Finnish food agency, the project will involve verifying whether the various operators in the food chain have the required, compulsory information needed to ensure traceability.
Slotting into the European framework regulation EC/178/2002 laid down in January 2002, new rules (Articles 14 to 20 of the regulation) enforced in January set out general provisions for imposing the traceability of food and feed.
For the new 'one up-one down' system, all players in the food industry must know who has delivered the product to them and to whom they have delivered the product.
Identification of the product must be possible and the delivery times must be known. Every operator, from buyers of wild products, producers and traders tomanufacturers, caterers and retail stores must be able to immediately provide this compulsory traceability information to food control officers on request. The operators may themselves determine how they collect and store the traceability information.
The information must be stored and available to the control authorities for a period of some months or years, depending on the product.
While food firms have always been under the legal duty to ensure that all food in the chain is safe, the new rules now formally require that they notify the local authorities should a food or feed withdrawal from the market arise.
As in previous years, the national authorities then feed information about the withdrawals to the European alert hub, the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF).
In place since 1979 the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF), broken down into ' alerts' and 'information' notifications, provides national authorities with a tool to swap information on national measures taken to ensure food safety, namely foods withdrawn from the food chain.
A recent report from RASFF reveals the number of 'information exchanges' - alerts and information combined - had risen from 3024 in 2002 to 4286 in 2003. The new traceability rules in force since January are likely to boost these figures.