Food and water safety concerns directly affect the wellbeing of the poor both as food producers and consumers. Consumption of unsafe water continues to be one of the major causes of preventable death and disease, with an estimated 2.2 million deaths each year from diarrhea alone, mostly children. In a world where 75% of the poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, poverty cannot be reduced without research investments towards improved management of food and water safety concerns to ensure healthy and productive lives and stable incomes for poor consumers.

Food safety concerns have become particularly salient, as recent food scares stemming from zoonotic diseases (avian flu, BSE, E. coli O157H7, and salmonella) have resulted in a growing political awareness regarding the need to reduce the incidence of food hazards in agricultural commodities. Consequently, this has led to the establishment of food safety standards and regulations for products along the supply chain regardless of whether they are destined for informal, formal, or export markets. Increasingly, the institutions involved in the provision of supply chain management play important roles in the delivery of high-value perishable agriculture and livestock products to distant markets, given their perishable nature and demands for certain quality and safety attributes.

Food safety and food security are intrinsically linked with water quality. Food production entails the use of water for activities ranging from irrigation to post-harvest processing. Water serves as a vehicle to spread potential contaminants, including pathogens from organic manure, fertilizers, pesticides, and effluents. Understanding the sources of food and water safety hazards and ways to mitigate them is required to improve water quality for poor consumers and to meet the production requirements of high value export markets.

Research in this theme focuses on: (1) the cost to smallholders of complying with increased food safety requirements, (2) public-private partnerships to ensure the delivery of safe food; understanding the source and the socio-economic impact of foodborne disease, plant diseases, and animal diseases, (3) evaluate the risks and cost-effectiveness of alternative disease control measures, and identifying the costs and benefits of these measures for different socio-economic groups, with particular emphasis on small-scale producers and poor consumers, and designing decision tools to aid policy makers in understanding the impact of their decisions on all segments of their society and (4) the relationship between water quality and food security and how this relationship can be influenced, through policies, technologies, and investments, to enhance food security, reduce poverty, and improve rural livelihoods.