2019 has been a momentous year for the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) network marking its 40th anniversary. This was appropriately celebrated with the conference “All you need is RASFF”, as part of the wider conference on the new Official Control Regulation, in December 2019.
The Regulation went into full application on the day after the conference and implemented notably the Information Manage- ment System for Official Control (IMSOC)1. For RASFF, it meant merging the Administrative Assistance and Cooperation (AAC) network with the RASFF network.
Following a Ministerial Conference2 in the wake of the fipronil incident, Member States and the Commission had agreed on 19 specific measures to reinforce the EU’s action against food fraud3. After Single Contact Points (SCP) had been set up in Member States for both systems in 2018, the AAC was finally successfully hosted in the iRASFF platform together with RASFF in October 2019. The choice was made to fully inte- grate RASFF and AAC so as to allow non-compliance notifications (notifications in the AAC network) to be easily “escalated” to the RASFF network. For the end of 2020, the Commission will extend this integration to the food fraud network although this network will keep its ability to work as a “closed community”.
This 40th anniversary of RASFF therefore breaks in an exciting new period in its history, one where cooper- ation is not only key within the RASFF network but cooperation is in addition enabled with other networks, that use the RASFF know-how to reinforce their functioning, within the concept of the IMSOC.
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