Bickering over site for essential new agency leaves sour taste in the mouth

Date: 11/04/02

The much-vaunted new European Food Safety Authority is months behind schedule. MEP Phillip Whitehead, one of the agency's main proponents, tells Laurence Frost it's time to act.

IT WAS trumpeted as a top priority of the current European Commission from day one, when President Romano Prodi and his team took office in September 1999.

David Byrne, the health and consumer affairs commissioner, got to work on ambitious proposals for a European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) straight away, and tabled them in November 2000.

Then, in a rare instance of inter-institutional cooperation, the Parliament and governments thrashed out a compromise in time to avoid formal negotiations on a project seen as crucial to restoring public confidence in food after the dioxin and BSE scares.

Yet, three months after it was supposed to be up and running, the EFSA is still at least another six months away from becoming operational.

Bickering member states have been unable to agree on where in Europe the new watchdog is to be kennelled, leaving its staff - as yet unappointed - facing an indefinite period in Brussels-based limbo until the question is sorted out.

To make matters worse, the Parliament's budget committee, disgusted by the ignominious squabbling, has withheld part of the funding needed to set up the agency.

All of this is a major frustration to Phillip Whitehead, the MEP who shepherded the draft proposals through the legislative process in near-record time.

'There's still a deadlock,' the UK Socialist says. 'I can't think of a time previously when there has continued to be discord for so long over a particular location.'

Helsinki came closest to winning the agency at December's Laeken summit, as it had done under the previous Swedish EU presidency.

But the compromise package of agency decisions proposed by the Belgian hosts fell victim to acrimonious exchanges led by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who allegedly claimed that 'the Finns don't even know what prosciutto is', thereby persuading Belgian premier Guy Verhofstadt to call it a day.

'The Italians, in effect, vetoed it in a very crude way,' says Whitehead. 'As I understand it they continue that veto to this day.'

The East Midlands MEP is at his desk in his Brussels office, where he sits very close to a large signed photograph of Joanna Lumley, the British actress famous for her role in the international TV hit Absolutely Fabulous.

The stalemate over location could have damaging consequences for the authority's ability to recruit good scientists to police the food chain, he warns.

'We want to have people of the highest calibre, but obviously nobody will give up a career somewhere else to sign up for a body where they don't know where they will be working. It's an absurd situation.'

Whitehead is also dismayed at the decision by fellow MEPs on the budget committee to withhold funding for the EFSA - punishing the Commission, he says, for a delay that is not its fault.

'We're kicking the Commission when really we should be kicking the Council.'

The former award-winning broadcaster has written to the budget committee rapporteur Carlos Costa Neves in protest at the move, which he predicts may force the Commission to find emergency funding to prevent the body from stalling in its infancy. 'That's an embarrassment we could have done without.'

The EFSA was established under Byrne's flagship food safety regulation, which also laid down a framework of general principles designed to apply across the board to all EU food law.

It introduces tough traceability requirements, obliging operators at every stage in the production process 'from farm to fork' to keep records of the source and destination of each shipment.

The 'precautionary principle', already applied in environmental legislation, is for the first time enshrined in EU food law, allowing governments to halt the sale of suspect products when there is a lack of adequate scientific knowledge for a proper risk assessment by the EFSA.

By coordinating scientific opinion and research, it is hoped the EFSA will be able to avoid such fiascos as last October's discovery that a UK study - apparently revealing significant BSE infection rates among sheep - had accidentally been conducted using tissue from cows' brains.

Operating on a budget of €40 million - considerably less than the funding received by similar bodies in some individual member states - the authority will employ 250 staff within three years.

Its relatively small budget has led to criticism that the authority's remit is too broad to be effective - covering risk assessments for human food, as well as a 'rapid alert' system for animal feed and safety approval of new varieties of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

'There's a danger that people will want to load everything onto the EFSA, simply because it's there,' Whitehead agrees.

'I think it's something we've got to watch out for.

'I have queried and will continue to query the decision by the two commissioners [Byrne and environment chief Margot Wallström] to make the EFSA the body which validates GMOs, which is a formidable task in itself. If you start with modest funds you should resign yourself to modest means.'

However, Whitehead rejects suggestions by consumer groups - such as Brussels-based BEUC - that the EFSA should limit itself to human food safety and leave animal feed to other expert bodies.

'They're inextricably linked,' he says. 'We are what we eat - we eat animals, and animals are what they eat.'

Besides its risk assessment role, the EFSA could also find itself the arbiter of tough new trade and financial sanctions against countries that persistently break EU food law, under plans being drawn up by the food safety commissioner.

Byrne said recently that he would consider export bans, trade restrictions and cuts in EU agricultural funding for countries failing to meet Community standards (European Voice, 22 November 2001).

The draft regulation, to be tabled later in the year, would give the Commission powers to take 'safeguard' measures against offending states or even 'ban all relevant exports' from the offending country, Byrne said.

Pressure for tougher action has grown partly in response to repeated discoveries of spinal cord fragments - banned material carrying a high risk of BSE - in shipments of beef from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland.

Whitehead believes an effective link between farm aid and food safety compliance is long overdue. 'It's necessary to have an equality of treatment within the community - and that means an equality of sanctions.' He singles out the Commission's decision last week to clear further government aid to French farmers hit by BSE while hesitating over whether to fine Paris for maintaining its ban on British beef - ruled unlawful by the European Court of Justice in December, following a three-year legal battle.

'We shouldn't be handing out large subsidies on the one hand and holding back on penalties on the other,' the MEP says.

The new European Food Safety Authority is months behind schedule. MEP Phillip Whitehead, one of the agency's main proponents, says it's time to act. Article is part of a special report on food safety.