The President of the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL), Dr Friedel Cramer, sees the ongoing digitization as both a challenge and an opportunity. The Federal Office will address it with its own digital agenda, IDW reports (link in German).
At the 4th LGL Congress on Food Safety and Animal Health, Dr Cramer explained:
“The federal government’s data strategy of January 2021 includes 234 measures in four fields of action. Their implementation presents major challenges, especially with regard to financing, data security, data sovereignty and data protection. In the same time, we have just experienced this during the Covid pandemic, digitization also creates enormous opportunities that need to be exploited. The BVL is pursuing a digital agenda adapted to its own tasks in order to use the diverse opportunities of digitization for consumer health protection and food safety.”
The focus areas for BVL’s digital agenda will be:
• Official coordination and cooperation in data management
• Digitization of the BVL administrative and specialist applications, including the application procedures, as well as in the laboratory area
• Provision of digitized information for the public
• Constant review of the need for protection of the data of the BVL