The European Food Authority: institutional challenges in risk regulation

FOREWORD BY JACQUES DELORS

Although it has not yet been completely resolved, the ‘mad cow crisis’ can already be considered one of the most significant events in European history over the last fifteen years.

It has forced politicians, administrators, experts and producers to question their role in guaranteeing food safety both at national and European Union level. More generally, it has revealed profound changes in our societies in terms of their relationship with food, scientific and technical progress and risk acceptance.

As devastating as it has been, this episode has a creative counterpart: it is helping to re-examine fundamental questions that few people had previously considered worth exploring in depth: What is the status of scientific expertise? What should be done when scientific facts are uncertain, insufficient or contradictory? Where does the responsibility of the expert end and that of the politician begin? It is at the intersection of these new questions that the European Food Authority is emerging, whose history deserves to be retraced as it sheds light on issues that are destined to endure.

The current Commission and its President deserve credit for recognising, from the outset, that these issues should be at the top of their agenda and for now presenting an operational plan. The Member States deserve credit for quickly agreeing on the principle of a European solution, on the same geographical scale as the problem itself. We would like to see this kind of obvious solution, which is far from self-evident, being adopted more often when necessary, for example in the fight against international crime or when it comes to environmental protection.

The fact remains that the debate is far from over, if I refer to François Lafond’s detailed and nuanced analysis. For my part, I would highlight two questions that deserve further consideration: Why limit ourselves to the food sector when the next crisis arising from the conflict between scientific progress and our societies’ desire for security, if it is to happen, will by its very nature be unpredictable and likely to be different from the “mad cow crisis”? Are we sure that by drawing such a clear line between expertise and political decision-making, we can definitively put an end to the debate on ‘risk regulation’ in an uncertain world, at a time when European citizens’ demand for security has never been so high?

I would like to thank François Lafond for clarifying, as far as possible, these difficult questions, which will remain so for a long time to come. May this study contribute to the emergence in European society of the ‘risk culture’ that the most clear-sighted of our political leaders are beginning to call for.