1st International Food Regulatory Summit, 2007
"Aligning India to the World"
10-11 April 2007; Hotel Intercontinental, New Delhi


The Confederation of Indian industry is organising the "1st International Food Regulatory Summit, 2007: Aligning India to the World" on 10 - 11 April, 2007 at Hotel Intercontinental, New Delhi.

This first ever Summit on this subject is being organised against the backdrop of the recently enacted Food Safety and Standards Act, which, by its inherent characteristics, provides a major opportunity for India for revisiting its current Food Regulatory regime. The task is to ensure that Indian consumers get high quality, safe food as well as create a more conducive regime to enable a faster growth of the Indian Food industry.

The Indian Food Processing industry is poised for a rapid growth. Accordingly, the food regulatory regime in India, while meeting the inherent consumer safety aspects, need to move towards a more flexible and a globally aligned regime, which on the one hand, fosters speedy innovations and on the other hand, enables Indian food businesses to achieve global competitiveness with respect to price, quality and delivery to markets and hence a higher participation in international Food trade.

This International Summit is being organised in this context and with the specific objectives of building a common ground in India for Food regulations by specifically leveraging the learnings from some other regulatory regimes.

In this regard, we are planning to bring into the Summit global perspectives from senior functionaries of leading international regulatory agencies, country regulatory agencies and professionals from Food businesses from develop and emerging economies, especially the South Eastern economies which have been fairly successful in harmonising their regulatory regime with global trends and therefore securing an important position in the global Food trade. The Indian Government authorities and its agencies at the Central and State levels involved in defining and administering food regulations are slated to participate in this Summit in a big way.

Based on the deliberations at the Summit, a White Paper is being proposed to be developed containing a medium to long-term Action Plan for defining the guiding principles and a Road Map for India for standard setting and implementation thereof with special reference to the roles to be played by different agencies. An allied special focus of the Summit will be to explore opportunities for establishing institutional mechanisms for fostering cooperation for harmonisation of Food regulations amongst the ASEAN countries with the close participation of both Regulatory authorities and businesses.