A number of essential measures to ensure consumers are protected from food-related incidents are omitted from the EU's White Paper on food safety, according to Dr Patrick Wall, chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.
With the EU spending €47 billion subsidising agriculture, it was not unreasonable that consumers expected safe food of high quality in return, he told an Irish Centre for European Law conference in Trinity College Dublin.
Yet a transparent and highly co-ordinated approach to food safety across the EU was long overdue, he said.
With dioxin contamination in Belgium and sewage sludge incidents in France, with animal feed implicated, it was depressing to note that these problems occurred 12 years after animal feed was identified as the source of the BSE problem.
Dr Wall accepted that a new European Food Authority proposed by the Irish Commissioner, Mr David Byrne, would have responsibility for risk assessment and risk communication but not risk management.
But he had seen no indication it would look at the fundamental issue of "how food is produced and how food-production systems are supported in the EU".
On risk assessment, he noted that standardised, data-collection systems in the EU barely existed and needed to be established urgently. Scientific advice alone was not sufficient to restore consumer confidence, he warned.
Consumers were showing signs of "risk fatigue" in the face of messages that, understandably, could be interpreted as taking the joy out of eating. Consumers did not want to become microbiologists, he said: "They want to know what is being done to make food safer".
More imaginative communication was necessary, reinforced by exemplars within the food industry who were achieving standards far higher than legal requirements.
While there was a need to weed out negligent food companies, securing commitment from industry was crucial to EU food safety reforms.
Industry rather than enforcement agencies had the ability to make food safer but, if industry was going to be isolated as a group that could not be trusted, consumer confidence would not be restored.
While some claimed that the EU had set itself a reform programme with unrealistic deadlines, introduction of some key measures was being accelerated, according to Mr Martin Territt, a member of Mr Byrne's cabinet. Measures on co-ordinating BSE testing across the EU, for example, were emerging ahead of schedule.
The new food authority would be "automatic first port of call" when scientific information on food safety and nutritional issues was needed. It would ensure that "divergent scientific advice" no longer occurred, unlike recent controversy between France and Britain over beef, he said.
The interface between the authority and other national agencies and scientific bodies was important, so much so that Mr Byrne was "exploring the possibility of laying down networking provisions in enabling legislation".
