Unsafe food threatens public health and undermines food security at local, regional, and global levels. For low-and middle-income countries, foodborne diseases pose a significant economic and social burden. Modern and reliable food safety regulatory systems are becoming a prerequisite for access to global markets and consumers in domestic markets are increasingly demanding safer food products. However, many developing countries’ exporters struggle with meeting global food safety standards.

The FSN is an interagency partnership agreement between the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (FDA/CFSAN), the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (USAID/RFS), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (USAD/FAS), which aims to strengthen Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulatory systems with an emphasis on a Global Food Security Strategy (GFSS) and Feed the Future (FTF) countries. The program is designed to strengthen impacts, leverage resources, and improve coordination to meet food safety, nutrition and public health objectives, as well as improved trade.

The FSN works to build SPS systems’ capacities around the world, targeting a broad range of measures, including those that lead to governments’ compliance with internationally accepted and science-based SPS standards that support an enabling environment for private sector access to markets.

FSN has three main components: