The present paper presents the SAFIR project (www.safir4eu.org), which addresses two fundamental problems that over the past decade increasingly have become concerns of the general public: the one problem being the jeopardizing of safety and quality of our food products, while the other being the increasing competition for clean freshwater. The SAFIR project has a multi-disciplinary approach, which integrates the European as well as the global dimension of the EU-policy on food quality and safety. The main driving force behind the project idea is new research results that demonstrated that scheduled uneven irrigation patterns can increase the water use efficiency as well as the quality of vegetable crops. Furthermore, recent innovations in the water treatment and irrigation industry have shown potential for the use of low quality water resources, such as reclaimed water or surface water in peri-urban agriculture, for irrigation of vegetable crops without threaten food safety and quality. The results of SAFIR were achieved from field experiments in Europe and China and modeling activities both at field and farm scale. The present article describes the structure of the project and highlights the main findings and recommendations of the project described in detail in already published papers and in accompanying papers in this special issue. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.