Regulating food safety in the European Union

Recent and highly publicized incidents in the European Union have urged policy makers to consider changes in the food-safety regulations affecting domestic and imported food products. The Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) crisis, followed by a series of more anecdotal food-contamination cases, has triggered a major change by placing food safety on the top of the agenda of most EU governments. The BSE crisis has had dramatic economic consequences, in addition to a significant number of deaths (most of them in the United Kingdom). After the finding of a possible link between BSE and a new strain of human disease, demand for beef fell and export bans hurt the entire sector throughout the European Union, costing billions of euros. The poor management of this crisis by British and other national and European authorities has also led to less visible, but very large impacts in terms of citizens’ emotion. At a smaller scale, the 1999 contamination of feed in Belgium also had serious trade impacts. When it became public that some fat used in animal feed was inadvertently contaminated with cancer-inducing dioxin, some animal imports from several European countries were banned in a number of regions, including the United States. This resulted in a decline in meat production in Belgium, hitting particularly the swine and poultry sectors. Again, a major effect was the loss of consumer confidence, which at some point led to imaginary risks. The withdrawal of Belgian soda (Coca Cola) from the market in 1999, in spite of any scientific evidence, can be seen as an indirect consequence of the dioxin crisis. The frequent food scares that have followed the release of information about pathogens such as Listeria found in some prepared meat and some soft cheese during the years 2000 in France, can also be attributed to a general mistrust of consumers (statistics show that the number of food-borne diseases due to Listeria has actually been falling and that fatal casualties are very exceptional). Such food scares seem to be mainly due to the release of information, which did not occur in the past. A particular situation in the EU is also the growing mistrust in science over the last decade. France is a typical example where the government has minimized the effect of major accidents, which have fueled suspicion and eroded public confidence. (The importance of asbestos-related cancers has been largely hidden under the pressure of the industry, and, when disclosed, past responsibility of mandated doctors in spreading wrong information has had a very negative effect on public opinion.) Involvement of scientists in hiding information from the public in the nuclear sector