WASHINGTON — The Grocery Manufacturers Association has pledged $1 million to the creation of the world's first Global Food Safety Fund, an innovative public-private partnership that will be managed by World Bank, an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs.

GMA's pledge was announced at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in Honolulu. The fund will address such food safety goals as developing, testing and validating pilot programs in APEC that will result in reproducible training modules, which can be customized for roll out to developing countries all around the world; addressing high priority food hazards; and strengthening analytics and metrics — much needed for consistent, reliable and scaleable testing, designing, and evaluation of the performance of food safety systems.

"GMA was honored to be a founding member of a unique partnership in APEC that inspired the concept of the fund's creation. In APEC we brought together food safety regulators, multilateral institutions like the World Bank, academia and industry — stakeholders all focused on a common mission of improving food safety," GMA CEO Pamela Bailey said. "The proposed fund will leverage APEC's unique food safety training programs together with World Bank international reach to help improve the safety of the global food supply — in APEC economies and beyond."