For Professor Chris Elliott, dioxin is a dirty word – and one he would like to hear a lot less in future. Indeed, that ambition is at the heart of an international research project he is driving, funded by 3m Euro from the European Commission’s Framework 7 Programme.
Dioxins are highly toxic, persistent environmental pollutants. Chris, Director of Queen’s Institute for Global Food Security, says, ‘If you think about the large number of food scares right across the world in the last 20 or 30 years – things like dioxins, BSE, salmonella outbreaks – they all have a common denominator: contaminated animal feed. Here at the Institute we thought that if you’re trying to make food safer, the first port of call should be the animal food supply chain.’
Along with several European colleagues, Professor Elliott and his team produced a large research proposal which they presented to the European Commission. In it, they explained their concept – QSAFFE, standing for Quality and Safety Feeds and Food for Europe. The EU evaluated it along with multiple other research proposals and ranked it number one of those submitted.
The four-year project is under way. ‘We’re linked up with a lot of excellent researchers in Europe but also further afield, through a partnership with a leading university in China. We’re looking at ways of trying to find contamination episodes much quicker than is currently the case. We’re trying to find out how those contaminations happened and to try to provide strategies for preventing them happening in the future.’
Chris was recruited by Queen’s in 2005, after 25 years in the Department of Agriculture Science Service, to head up the Institute which had just been created.
‘It was a great opportunity to link up with many highly ranked international organisations, food production and biotechnology companies, and to collaborate with them on research"... cheap food isn’t everything, but safe and high quality food is of great importance." of importance globally, but also with substantial importance to our local agri-food sector and consumers.
‘My brief from the University was to try to reinvigorate both teaching and research in agriculture and food, to try to move them forward with new and cutting-edge dimensions. The student intake then was low but now, for every place Queen’s has, we’re getting eight applicants. Not only that, but when we introduced a new Food Safety Masters programme, within a few weeks of advertising, we had enough international students to fill the course.’
After years when agriculture in Northern Ireland was in poor shape, Chris now sees an agri-food economy which is doing extremely well and out-performing just about every other sector.
But food scares are often big news. Chris works with the Science Media Centre, an independent, London-based team which aims to get to the facts behind the headline.
‘They will contact me and ask me if I want to comment about a scare. Often there’s nothing in it to alarm the public about – or no-one’s going to get ill from what happened. But sometimes there’s the other extreme – like a very bad case of E. coli in Germany where 35 people died. What was the true source of that contaminated food?
‘Food traceability is one of our big research themes. Think of cars. If there’s a fault, a manufacturer will know within a short time who owns the cars and where in the world they are. You can’t do that with food.
‘If our research goes the way we want it, you won’t actually see the successful impact because there should be no food scares. We work with a lot of local companies which import feed materials and they’re trying to prevent the next dioxin scare. If there are no more dioxin scares in Ireland we can take some of the credit for that. The success will ultimately show impact with Northern Ireland food produce gaining an even higher world-wide reputation for being safe.
‘It’s not that we’re going to produce some wonderful molecule or the cure for cancer. Our research is about trying to prevent things from happening. The world has cottoned on to the fact that cheap food isn’t everything, but safe and high quality food is of great importance.’
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