F
CHAIN APPROACH:
N
Joint and individual responsibility for safe feed
by Johan den Hartog, Managing Director of GMP+ International
o matter how serious an individual company is about its responsibility, safe feed can never be the result of the efforts of a single party. The weight of safe feed rests on the shoulders of all links in the chain. Issues regarding own responsibility and (deflecting) blame are as old as humanity itself. The holy books of the three great monotheistic religions all contain the famous story of Adam and Eve. When Adam took a bite of the forbidden fruit in paradise, he blamed Eve for it – after all she had eaten it first and had given him the fruit. Eve, in turn, pointed the accusing finger to the devious snake that had seduced her. According to the tradition, God did not accept these apologies: it was the responsibility of Adam and Eve to not eat from the tree and they could not blame anyone else for it. That wisdom is still valid today. It is not hard to see the similarities with an integral chain approach for the production of safe feed: the mistakes of one can affect the other, but that never relieves the latter party of its own responsibility for the choices it makes.
Too late
The chain is as strong as its weakest link. That is why feed safety assurance should not only be focused on individual companies, but on the chain as a whole. Companies can seek certification for this through independent assessment. Such an approach means, in reality, that companies that are certified for safe feed can only purchase products and services from suppliers that are (equivalently) certified as well. Fairly quickly after the GMP+ Feed Safety Assurance (GMP+ FSA) certification was established we saw the importance of involving the entire chain in the pursuit of safe feed. Initially (19921999), the quality requirements and standards only applied to the factory where the compound feed was produced. But no matter how strictly the company adhered to the rules, the factory always had to deal with supplied ingredients. If there was something wrong with it, the requirements and standards of
70 | August 2017 - Milling and Grain