Herman Diricks is currently Chief Executive Officer of the Belgian Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain (FASFC). The FASFC is an executive body, which has jurisdiction over the entire territory and is responsible for laying down, implementing and enforcing measures related to food safety, animal health and plant protection.

Trained as a bioscience engineer, Herman Diricks has been working in the areas of Public Health, Food and Feed safety and technology since 1984.
After a brief stint as a scientific associate at the VUB, he joined the Ministry of Agriculture in 1986 where he spent 4 years working in the areas of pesticides, fertilisers and genetically modified organisms.
Herman Diricks then went on to start a new IT service introducing modern IT technologies in the Department of Agriculture, after which he became head of the IT department of the Ministry of Agriculture.

From 1999 to 2000, he worked as an advisor, first to the Secretary-general, then to the Minister of Agriculture, where he advised on general policy matters and on food safety. Between 2000 and 2002, Mr. Diricks was an independent consultant in the fields of food safety, quality and administrative reorganisation.

In 2002, he joined the Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain as Director-general of the Corporate Services where he was in charge of human resources, ICT services, budgeting, logistics and the legal department. In this capacity, he was responsible for the administrative foundations and financing policy of the newly founded agency.

Between 2006 and May 1st of 2014, Herman Diricks occupied the post of Director-general Control Policy and was responsible for the policy on control measures and programmes aimed at protecting the health of humans, animals and plants. Furthermore, DG Control Policy maintains international relations regarding the aforementioned areas and drafts Belgian regulations on process hygiene criteria and animal and plant health. It also deals with sector organisations and cooperates with DG Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE, working groups and Standing Committee) and other Member States.