**3. Food Safety in H. alal Assurance ¯**

Nowadays food safety is a responsibility of government agencies and organizations. European Community (EC) legislation (see Table 1) is primarily geared towards ensuring the production of safe foods for human health but also for ensuring free competition in the food market.

For foodstuffs of animal origin, further specific hygiene requirements are necessary (prescribed by Reg. 853/2004) [22], as these products may present macrobiotic and chemical risks for the human health and therefore, they require the application of specific rules. The rules dictated by Reg. 853/2004 are added to those related to animal welfare [72], without posing particular issues to ritual slaughter operators.

In addition to the above mentioned laws, Regulation (EC) N. 1935/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 October 2004 on the regulation of materials and articles intended to come into contact with foodstuffs [23] should also be taken in account. In general, once these materials come into contact with food, they must not cause unacceptable changes in foodstuffs; nor should these provisions pose particular problems to h. alal slaughter operators. ¯

Hazard Analysis and Critical Control point (HACCP) system is considered to be effective for enhancing food safety; furthermore, other standards, such as ISO series, Approved Quality Assurance (AQA), Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and the Food Safety Management System (FSMS) could be considered for food quality and safety. These standards could be contemplated by more than one hundred active certifying bodies, governmental or non-governmental organizations, for h. alal compliance [ ¯ 73]. In a recent study, many areas for potential research in halal¯ assurance in the food industry have been identified, and critical issues have been highlighted [74]. Incorporating halal features into the HACCP system could be a plausible tool for hal ¯ al assurance. ¯ As the HACCP and H. alal certification processes are similar, the integration of the hal ¯ al assurance ¯ scheme into the HACCP system could be feasible [75].

Although the knowledge of all factors influencing the h. alal assurance systems is a determinant to ¯ help companies to identify intervention strategies to improve their performance, limited literature is available on this issue [76]. Recently, Malaysian researchers have applied an interesting study design to explore critical factors affecting the h. alal assurance systems: di ¯ fferent factors in every country, region or food chain can be found, with differences resulting between food sectors and subsectors and among small or medium (SME) and large-sized enterprises [77]. These studies are particularly important for SMEs that have limited resources.
