Digesting the lessons of Belgian food scandal

Date: 15/07/1999

By Simon Taylor

THE origin of the dioxin which found its way into Belgian chicken feed, sparking Belgium's biggest health scare and toppling the government of Jean-Luc Dehaene, has still not been precisely identified.

But the shock waves from the scandal continue to ripple out from this small north European country, tarnishing Belgium's cherished image as the home of top-quality food products and prompting an intense debate across the EU on how to prevent similar threats to health occurring again.

The main shortcomings in food policy exposed by the crisis were the delays before the Belgian authorities acted to tackle the menace to public health, and the problems involved in tracing suspect food to remove it from the human food chain.

Despite discovering in March this year that feed for chickens and pigs had been contaminated with the cancer-causing chemical dioxin, the Belgian ministry of agriculture dragged its feet for a full month before taking any action to keep potentially dangerous food off the supermarket shelves. It also failed to fulfil its legal obligation to inform other member states' authorities and the European Commission about the problem.

The Commission has already decided to take the Belgian government to court over this, although officials admit that the legal challenge is mainly a public rap over the knuckles.

These shortcomings are all the more serious because national authorities are still largely responsible for policing food safety issues. In the wake of the BSE crisis, one Union-wide body - the Dublin-based Food and Veterinary Office - was given responsibility for ensuring that EU safety standards were being observed at European food production sites. But the organisation was only given a staff of 130 veterinary experts to police food safety across the whole of the Union with its population of 350 million.

FVO staff can therefore only check that national authorities are doing their job properly. Outgoing Consumer Affairs Commissioner Emma Bonino told a special hearing in the European Parliament last month that the office would need 1,400 inspectors just to visit all approved food establishments once a year.

MEPs who attended the hearing called for the creation of an independent food standards agency along the lines of the US' Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), which has drastic powers to tackle public health risks.

But, as Bonino pointed out, the FDA does not have responsibility for red meat or chicken, which fall under the remit of the US department of agriculture. In any case, she added, there was no political will in the EU to create a mammoth food standards agency, not least because of the costs involved.

The European consumer organisation BEUC argues that while national authorities are in charge of protecting food standards, the relevant inspectors should at the very least be independent of the ministry of agriculture. This would help to ensure that there was no potential conflict of interest between acting decisively to protect public health and defending European farmers' livelihoods.

Yet even with tightly policed rules and regulations, no system can guarantee 100% protection against accidents or criminal behaviour.

The French government has called for a total ban on non-vegetable fats in animal feed, but such an embargo would not have prevented the Belgian dioxin scare if, as it now seems likely, the source of the contamination was motor oil accidentally put into a recycling container intended only for edible oils.

As a precaution against possible future problems, FEFAC, which represents European animal feed-makers, is calling for all suppliers of oils and fats for the feed industry to be approved and inspected to ensure the reliability of their produce.

The other key problem highlighted by the Belgian crisis is the difficulty authorities' face in establishing which products have actually been contaminated. After the Belgian scare peaked, shops began displaying certificates claiming that the goods on sale on the shelves were guaranteed dioxin-free, but consumer groups have cast doubt on the validity of these documents.

BEUC argues that it should be possible to identify each batch of food by expanding the information contained in bar codes. But in a highly integrated market where milk from one EU country is mixed with supplies from other producers before being processed for use in cakes and pastries in a third country, traceability is hard to guarantee in practice.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that public authorities only take decisive action after a crisis has occurred. It seems that the maxim 'prevention is better than a cure' has yet to establish itself as the slogan of EU governments when it comes to food safety.