Food safety is the meat and poultry industries' top priority, said Betsy Booren, American Meat Institute (AMI)'s scientific affairs director, the statement being directed at the USDA, which sets its funding priorities accordingly.

Booren delivered that message at USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) meeting, which was designed to collect comments about how the agency should develop funding requests for its 2011 Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI). AFRI is NIFA's flagship competitive-grant programme established by the 2008 Farm Bill.

"Research on food processing technologies, food ingredients, animal production and other critical multi-disciplinary areas in the food sciences is needed to solve problems facing today's agricultural community," she told the group. "These multi-disciplinary areas are integral to food safety research."

She also called for more basic research, explaining that the AMI Foundation believes a "fundamental understanding of biological, physical, microbial and chemical properties will help provide solutions to problems facing the agriculture and food industries."