Making food more than good

An increasing number of EU rules setting standards for food aim to make what European citizens eat as free of risk as possible. Emily Smith reports.

European food companies are obliged to do much more than make sure that their products taste good. An ever-increasing number of EU rules set standards for the safety, quality, health and even ethics of the food on our tables.

Rules controlling the addition of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients to foods were agreed last year, along with a new labelling regime for health claims. Food companies, health experts, lawyers and advertisers are now waiting to see what these two regulations will mean in practice.

Genetically modified (GM) crops provide the most high-profile environmental and ethical food concern for Europeans. Detailed EU legislation on the approval, cultivation, import, processing and release of biotech crops has so far failed to convince the majority of Europeans that GM food is safe.

But there are other health concerns as well. The level of pesticides in food is closely monitored, with a report on trace pesticides found in fresh food published every year.

For food producers, safety is an age-old concern. The fear of losing sales by making shoppers ill has usually been sufficient guarantee of some level of consumer protection, even without tough legislation. But in 2002 the EU agreed to standardise food safety definitions and monitoring systems across the member states, to promote "the free movement of safe and wholesome food". The regulation covers all stages of food production, including the feed given to farm animals.

The regulation allows for "societal, economic, traditional, ethical and environmental factors" to be taken into account in EU risk management programmes, as well as "scientific risk assessment". It gives "food business operators" primary responsibility for ensuring food safety, which clears up a legal grey area in some member states. If an operator finds his product has been contaminated, he or she is legally obliged to remove the food from markets across Europe and to provide the necessary explanations to consumers.

The regulation defines, for the first time, the circumstances in which the ‘precautionary principle’ can be used to keep a food off the market. Previously, some member states had been more reluctant than others to use this principle, which is commonly paraphrased as meaning that not having the proof that something might be a problem is not a reason for not taking action. According to the regulation, food can be taken off the market on the basis of this triple negative, but only if it is "proportionate and no more restrictive of trade than is required".

The most high-profile development from the 2002 regulation was the creation of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA - see Page 19), as an independent scientific body carrying out risk assessments. The authority started its work in 2003, but the standardised food safety rules for food companies came into force only on 1 January 2005.

Industry and health groups say that it is still too early to know whether the new regulation has improved food safety. The 2005 report from the European Commission-managed Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF), however, shows a 22% increase in reported food safety incidents - and subsequent market withdrawals - in the first year that the new rules were in force.

Around 36% of the 3,158 food and feed risk notifications received were to do with nuts and nut products, 12% involved fruit and vegetables, 12% fish, crustaceans and molluscs.

Less than a third of the notifications concerned products originating from the EU. Iran and China were the top two problem countries of origin, with 723 risk notifications between them. Showing that, however tough the EU laws become, putting risk-free food on European tables is likely to be a problem for some time yet.

An increasing number of EU rules setting standards for food aim to make what European citizens eat as free of risk as possible. Emily Smith reports.