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D. MILLER, Department of Chemistry, Carleton Univ., 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada

The food supply of the USA and Canada is highly resilient in that staple crops both for domestic consumption and export are produced under very good growing conditions which provides competitive advantage to our growers. Although mycotoxins accumulate in crops destined for human consumption every year, food-grade grain can be sourced from unaffected areas in the continent. There remains a concern for people eating large amounts of grains that do not enter the formal grain processing system which I believe poses an important challenge for regulators. At the third FAO/UNEP/WHO meeting on mycotoxins (1977, 1987, 1999), some 50 countries met to consider this problem. There was general agreement that mycotoxins posed a substantial threat to human health in some countries and to world trade in grains and some other food products. Recommendations were made on the need for better exposure assessments, studies of the effect of mycotoxin exposure on humans health in highly-affected regions, linking stringent international tolerances of mycotoxins in commodities to genuine public health gains and more focus on the planting of appropriate crops and crop genotypes to avoid the problem. The conference also formally asked the JECFA to have a meeting dealing with mycotoxins. Although the completion of the FDA/National Toxicology Program two-year study on the rodent carcinogenicity of fumonisin B1 has put the spotlight on fumonisin, CODEX , the EU Scientific Committee for Food, the governments of Austria and The Netherlands have been discussing variously the mycotoxins ochratoxin, deoxynivalenol and zearalenone and fumonisin will undoubtedly soon be discussed. There are material disagreements about the toxicities of these compounds with opinion ranging over at 1-2 orders of magnitude. There are also concerns about the public health gain and the feasibility of regulating small concentrations of mycotoxins in commodities that comprise a minor part of the diet.