The export of potatoes is being disrupted as foreign countries do not want to take potatoes from our country due to the presence of harmful bacteria. Bangladesh Food Safety Authority emphasised producing better quality potatoes by importing better seeds. Though Bangladesh produces over-abundant potatoes, we export minimum due to unattaining bio certificates. Biosecurity is a key requirement for achieving the export target of food, agriculture, fisheries, and forestry items. Biosecurity has direct relevance to food safety, the conservation of the environment (including biodiversity), and the sustainability of agriculture.
Biosecurity encompasses all policy and a regulatory framework to manage risks associated with food and agriculture, including fisheries and forestry and constitutes food safety, plant life and health, and animal life and health. Growing interest in Biosecurity is a result of major international developments such as globalisation of the world economy, the rapid increase in the volume of communications, transport and trade, technological progress and growing awareness of problems faced by biological diversity and the environment.
Since the pandemic, it is clear that animal corona viruses are budding threats to the human community, and the global pandemic caused by the newly emerged corona virus Sars-CoV-2 is related to its predecessor Sars-CoV. The battle against pathogens is a never-ending battle, and we need to follow the emergence and re-emergence of corona viruses through genome analysis and to understand the changes in proteins and genomes for effective therapeutics.
The corona virus pandemic showed us the importance of biosafety and biosecurity of what we eat. The concept of biosafety is ignored here as we are still fighting against hunger, malnutrition and poverty. However, biosafety is not a luxury as we know now. There are hundreds of bioengineering graduates coming out each year from universities who hardly get any opportunity to implement their knowledge. Not only for exploiting export opportunities, but also for consumers’ safety and overall human safety, we should focus on the biosafety of our agricultural, poultry, livestock, fisheries, and forestry items.
