A changing climate can affect food production worldwide.
Drought can reduce crop yields.
Heavy rain can disrupt food supply chains.
Unseasonable frost and hail can affect fruit production.
Plants and animals are more susceptible to pests and diseases.
Warmer and wetter weather can lead to more moulds in food crops.
These can produce unseen poisonous chemicals called mycotoxins
that enter into food.
So they have to be monitored, assessed and controlled to protect consumers.
When the moulds contaminate a food -it can be during production or during storage.
If the conditions are right large amounts of this toxin or poison
accumulates in the food.
And if large amounts of the food are consumed,
consumers are therefore consuming large amounts of the toxin.
In some cases you can have acute outbreaks,
people die very quickly from eating highly contaminated commodities.
In the past decade, contamination by a mycotoxin called aflatoxin
has spread to Southern Europe during hot, humid summers,
affecting maize crops.
Aflatoxin is carcinogenic, it is genotoxic,
and it is effective in reducing the immune defences of animals and humans.
Climate change is really challenging for people working with mycotoxins
because increasing temperature we have an increase in carbon dioxide
and a different distribution of rainfall.
It means that we will face changes in fungal behaviour in the future.
As part of Europe’s food safety system,
EFSA assesses the potential risks from mycotoxins in maize and other crops across Europe.
Since EFSA was established in 2002,
we have developed around 25 risk assessments on mycotoxins.
These risk assessments advise the European Commission and the Member States
and by legislation the consumers and the farm animals are protected.
Member State organisations in the EU can submit data to EFSA on mycotoxins
which we would then use in our risk assessments.
We also fund various research projects to gather data or as a result of
the risk assessment when we identify gaps in the results, then we stimulate new research.
EFSA funds and supports scientific work in Member States, including monitoring
and data collection, developing databases and computer tools for analysing data
and predicting future mycotoxin levels.
We had a project with EFSA to predict the risk of aflatoxin contamination in maize,
wheat and rice in climate change.
We have maps for the actual situation
and we have also two further maps: one for the plus 2 degrees centigrade scenario
and one for the plus 5 degrees centigrade scenario.
The plus 2 scenario is related with the highest risk of aflatoxin contamination.
In southern Europe we have the risk to produce maize with a contamination
higher than the legal limit in Europe.
So, the crop must be managed to minimise the mycotoxin contaminant.
Now when we consider the climate change we can see already now that some of the mycotoxins,
particularly in the southern part of Europe, are moving to Central Europe.
And in the northern part when the weather is getting a bit too warm for them,
they are disappearing.