12th IFDC 2017 Special Issue – Challenges facing the establishment and management of a national food composition database in Argentina

Publication date: December 2019Source: Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, Volume 84Author(s): Norma Samman, Maria Constanza RossiAbstractFood composition data play a key role in areas such as nutrition, agriculture, food industry, and trade. Therefore it is still essential to have recent and reliable data on the composition of the main foodstuffs that a country produces and consumes. In Argentina the objective is to form a national network of institutions to provide information and data to a national food composition database (NFCDB), established in a national government institution and as an ongoing activity with stable funding. ARGENFOODS promotes these activities, and successfully completed the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Regional Project entitled “Development of Food Composition Databases and Tables of Argentina, Chile and Paraguay to Strengthen International Trade and Consumer Protection”. Argentina has the multiple tools and trained human resources necessary to complete a National Project. A law proposal presented by the working group of ARGENFOODS to the national Senate establishes “[a] National Data Base for Food Composition [to be] created in the scope of the National Executive Power”, and is undergoing the approval process. Argentina is thus in a situation that could be termed contradictory and deficient, since it has all the tools to build an NFCDB, but has not achieved this goal despite the fact that the demand for the information is...
Source: Journal of Food Composition and Analysis - Category: Food Science Source Type: research