in the Cyprus businesses, services and the society in general. Food and Biotechnology is a sector in which the European Standardization Committee (CEN) has been very active. The increasing interest in Europe on food safety and consumer’s protection led to the rapid increase of standardisation in this sector, both in the set up of European Technical committees as well as in drafting and publishing standards dealing with safety of food, methods of analysis of food, utensils in contact with food etc. The European Standardisation Committee has published more than 400 standards related mostly with food sampling and analysis methods, and continues at present with a wide in scope work program.

Additionally CEN cooperates a lot in this sector with the International Organisation of Standardisation (ISO), and also with several other European and international organisations, like the Codex Alimentarius Commission. So far ten European standards published by CEN have been adopted as general methods of the Codex Alimentarius Commission. Moreover CEN is a member of MoniQA (Monitoring and Quality Assurance in the food supply chain), a European network funded by the European Union which deals with quality and food safety.