Food agency starved of talent

By Martin Banks

Date: 30/06/05

THE European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) says that problems in recruiting "high-calibre" staff could undermine its ability to do its work.

Its director, Geoffrey Podger, said the Parma-based agency has only just over a third of the experienced scientists it needs.

EFSA currently has a 150-strong workforce, 80 of whom are scientists. But only about 30 of these are of the more senior grades, he said. The agency recently had to 'downgrade' 38 senior posts to fall into line with the European Commission's recruitment guidelines.

The agency is expected to have 350 staff by the time it is fully operational this October but Podger said its current inability to hire experienced staff was "cause for real concern".

The reason for the problem, he said, was a requirement on EU agencies, including EFSA, to comply with the rules of the new staff regulation which was introduced last year.

Podger said: "The result is that the number of senior people we are able to take on has had to be reduced, which obviously restricts our ability to hire staff at the level of seniority we would like.

"The jobs we are offering are consequently generally too junior and not sufficiently remunerated to attract the type of high-calibre, professionally experienced people we need. Often, we find ourselves having to recruit junior people straight from university instead."

He added: "I want to stress this is not a case of an agency pleading for more money: under current rules we are simply not able to recruit at the grades we would like." This was "worrying", he said, because the agency relied on its senior staff to fulfil one of the primary aims of its mandate: providing highly specialised and scientific advice.

Podger added: "This gives me cause for real concern because it could have a terrible knock-on effect in terms of the work we are able to do."

EFSA was set up by the European Commission in 2002, partly as a response to a succession of food scares, including BSE, dioxins and concerns over genetically modified food. It also has responsibility for communicating food risks. It started work in Brussels but the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi officially inaugurated its new premises in Parma last Tuesday (21 June).

Other EU agencies say they too have experienced similar problems, albeit less severe. A spokesman for the Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, one of the EU's smaller agencies, said: "This is an issue for us as well.

"For example, we recently had a vacancy for head of administration at the agency, a post for which we would normally expect to receive many applications. But there was hardly any interest because the grade was too low. It was only when we re-issued the post at a higher grade that it was filled."

A spokesman for the European Maritime Safety Agency, which is currently recruiting new staff, said: "There was a request for the EU institutions to reduce the grading of senior posts. In a very limited number of cases, we had some difficulties in recruiting specialised senior officers but, on the whole, this trend did not affect EMSA recruitment."

A spokeswoman for the Commission's administration department said that the general philosophy of the staff reforms had been to move towards recruiting people at a lower grade than before.

In recent discussions on the implementation of the reform, agencies had raised the difficulties that they might encounter with recruitment at the bottom grades in attracting the required specialists.

It had been resolved, she said, that agencies could recruit at higher grades, while demanding a minimum number of years of experience, commensurate with the grade, just as happened with recruitment to certain parts of the Commission.

The agencies would also have to take into account in the choice of grade offered, the length of the contact and the career prospects in the agency.

"The Commission has no reason to believe that lower entry salaries will lead to less competitivity on the job market. But it will follow the situation nevertheless,

Article reports that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was having problems in recruiting more senior staff, which could undermine its ability to do its work. The agency said that this was due to a requirement on EU agencies, including EFSA, to comply with the rules of the new staff regulation which was introduced in 2005.