As the agricultural sector faces mounting pressure to raise production, consumer trust in the safety of the food supply chain has been eroding, a European Commission official warned.
The EU's agri-food sector is increasingly becoming industrialised. With the global population expected to reach nine billion in 2050, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that production will have to increase by 70% to feed the planet.
But although industrialisation has helped bring food prices down, it also caused massive health scares, like the mad cow disease in the 1990s or, more recently, the E.coli outbreak, which killed 48 people in Germany, leading to hundreds of millions of losses for the sector.
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