SAFFI targets food for EU’s 15 million and China’s 45 million children under the age of three. It aims at developing an integrated approach to enhance the identification, assessment, detection and mitigation of safety risks raised by microbial and chemical hazards all along EU and China infant food chains. SAFFI will benchmark the main safety risks through an extensive hazard identification system based on multiple data sources and a risk ranking procedure. It will also develop procedures to enhance top-down and bottom-up hazard control by combining management options with a panel of technologies for the detection and mitigation of priority hazards. SAFFI will discover unexpected contaminants by predictive toxicology and improve risk-based food safety management of biohazards by omics and predictive microbiology. SAFFI will co-develop with and deliver to stakeholders a decision-support system (DSS) to enhance safety control all along the food chain. This DSS will integrate the databases, procedures and methods described above and will be a framework for a generic DSS dedicated to other food. This overall methodology will be implemented in two complementary European and Chinese mirror projects and exemplified for each, with four case studies that were selected to cover priority hazards, main ingredients, processes and control steps of the infant food chain. Resulting databases, tools and procedures will be shared, cross-validated, concatenated, benchmarked and finally harmonized for further use in the EU and China. SAFFI will also set up training and knowledge transfer activities to foster EU-China harmonization of good practices, regulations, standards and technologies, and will cluster with other projects under the EU-China FAB Flagship initiative for continuous upgrade of food safety control. This EU-China multi-actor consortium of 20 partners involves academia, food safety authorities, infant food companies, paediatrics and technological and data-science SMEs.

The project deals with the urgent need to provide climate-resilient cultivars addressed to organic vegetable production systems. These new cultivars will benefit organic growers, and the organic seed industry, providing much needed security both under current and future scenarios of climate change. In this project, we will exploit the genetic variation of broccoli, kohlrabi, bean and tomato for enhanced productivity, by exploiting up-to-date knowledge of genome structure and function. This work will be enhanced by the active involvement of farmers, advisory services, research institutes, breeding companies and food processors from diverse geographical/climatic contexts in Europe and Non-EU countries. The selection of pre-breeding/ breeding lines for the three species will be undertaken in organic vegetable farming systems, utilizing an annual crop rotation scheme. New cultivars will be selected for efficiency when grown under water, temperature, and nitrogen stress, for resistance to some pests and diseases, for desirable product quality traits such as taste, visual appearance, post-harvest performance. The Stakeholder Board will contribute to the expected outcomes of the project. Crop genetic diversity will be broad as we will be utilizing several landraces (LRs) and crops wild relatives (CWRs) provided by partners for the foreseen pre-breeding and breeding activities. We will adopt an innovative approach, where plant traits related to the roots-zone, and to root-growth, and architecture that enable a better interaction with organic soil and its microbiome, are sought to benefit the end-users. This approach will ensure that the available genetic resources and bred-germplasm, combined with the best on-farm management practices will enhance resource use efficiency and productivity. The germplasm from this project will act to pump-prime the production of new seed for the organic growing sector and will also serve as a model for the enhancement of other crops.

EU-China-Safe will mobilise resources in Europe and China to develop a cohesive partnership that will deliver a shared vision for food safety and authenticity and work towards “mutual recognition”. Comprising 15 participants from the EU and 18 from China, EU-China-Safe contains key research organisations, Government and industry needed to develop and jointly implement major advances in improving food safety and combating food fraud in the two trading blocks. EU-China-Safe will build the core components needed for a joint EU-China food safety control system comprising: control management, food legislation, food inspection, food control laboratories, and food safety and quality information, education and communication. The project will develop an EU-China Joint Laboratory Network that will achieve and demonstrate equivalency of results, and will develop a state of the art virtual laboratory, with interchangeable staff from two continents, that will be used as a “showcase” to communicate and demonstrate best practice. Innovative traceability tools will strengthen the most vulnerable supply chains. New or improved detection capabilities for chemical/microbiological hazards and food fraud will be implemented in a harmonised way across the EU-China network. Trade barriers caused by food safety and fraud issues will be analysed and recommendations of how to predict and prevent future events disseminated. The project will focus on the most commonly reported foods linked to chemical and microbiological contamination and fraud (infant formula, processed meat, fruits, vegetables, wine, honey, spices). Substantial knowledge transfer and training actions will build high-level and long-term collaboration, synergies and trust between a wide range of EU and China actors. These advances, in addition to a wider range of confidence building measures towards food safety, authenticity and transparency, will address consumer expectations and facilitate an expansion of EU- China trade.

EUCLEG aims to reduce Europe and China’s dependency on protein imports by developing efficient breeding strategies for the legume crops of major economic importance in human food and animal feed. The objective is to improve diversification, crop productivity, yield stability and protein quality of both forage (alfalfa and red clover) and grain (pea, faba bean and soybean) legumes. Using diverse and extensive genetic resources and taking advantage of advanced molecular tools, EUCLEG aims to identify and develop the best genetic resources, phenotyping methods and molecular tools to breed legume varieties with improved performance under biotic and abiotic stresses in the representative European and Chinese agro-ecological areas. The potential for new uses of forage species for human nutrition will be explored. Searchable databases will be developed or built to host passport, agronomic and genetic data facilitating exchanges and use of genetic resources. The evaluation of genetic resources in multi-site trials will allow to broaden the breeding material and extend agro-ecological adaptation. The genetic architecture of key breeding traits will be analysed using association studies in order to identify molecular markers related to phenotypic traits. Finally, genomic selection strategies will be assessed for their potential to improve genetic progress. Practical tools for genotyping, data management and calculation will be provided to breeders to implement marker-assisted selection and genomic selection leading to the creation of new varieties in the long-term. The partnership gathered in EUCLEG, combining public institutes and private companies of Europe and China, guaranties the transfer of knowledge from research to seed industry.