Agricultural Professional Training As the Safety of the Food Chain

Szendrő, Éva

Keywords: engineer education, extraordinary situations, public service, special legal order, survey, Q18, Q19

The increasing intensity of international conflicts, and especially the ongoing war in Ukraine highlight the importance of safety and security of the food chain. This is a question of strategic importance because the food chain is an integral part of the critical supply systems, and –at the same time-it is extremely vulnerable, because of the openness of the system. In the curricula of current Hungarian agricultural and another education programmes there is a lack of preparation of the future specialists, how to act in extraordinary situations, what the demands of their job are, when-due to natural (e.g., Covid) or human –caused processes (e.g., bioterror-attacks) the stability of the food safety system is jeopardised. Based on a short summary of Hungarian legal sources, regulating the life of the society under special circumstances the current study presents the results of a survey, carried out among Hungarian higher education workers. Most of them acknowledge the importance of inclusion of these pieces of knowledge into the curriculum, but they consider, that the inclusion of these pieces of knowledge cannot be considered as a priority, because there are numerous other problems beyond these. As a conclusion it is obvious, that their pieces of knowledge must be integrated into the curriculum, but the importance of experiments and the practice orientation should be emphasised. This could be achieved by the close cooperation of different higher educational institutions.