Why consumers’ fears continue to provide food

Date: 31/10/02

By Karen Carstens

What tactics can the European Food Safety Authority employ to allay the concerns of increasingly wary customers?

'IF PEOPLE let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.'

Simply replace government with 'multinationals' and this quote attributed to the early 19th-century US President Thomas Jefferson could be transposed into modern times, reflecting the wary mood of today's EU consumers vis-à-vis much of what lurks on their supermarket shelves.

It's not that people don't like to eat anymore in Europe - just look at how seriously the often lengthy affair called 'lunch' is taken by many in Brussels - it's only that they are confused about what to eat to stay 'safe'. Fear surged and beef sales plummeted when the UK-based BSE crisis swept the continent a few years ago.

Then there was the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic and a host of other food scares, including dodgy animal feed scandals in Belgium and France.

And as if that weren't enough to make our stomachs turn, there is the constant genetically modified organism (GMO) 'threat', looming ominously over Europe like the sword of Damocles. Genetically modified organisms are demonised by concerned consumer groups and NGOs but defended by the biotech industry as safe and environmentally sound alternatives that increase crop yields and nutrition levels.

To address consumers' fears, the EU decided it was high time to take some serious action on the food safety front. In this vein, the European Commission launched a wide-ranging reform of EU food law in its January 2000 White Paper on Food Safety and officially launched the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) last February.

This independent body should be operating at full capacity once it gets its scientific committees up and running, probably sometime early next year, according to Beate Gminder, a spokeswoman for Health and Consumer Affairs Commissioner David Byrne.

'The quality and accessibility of scientific advice is of paramount importance to ensure effective, timely and appropriate decision-making,' Byrne said in a speech last month. 'In future we will look to the authority to provide that advice.'

EFSA, which will cover 'all parts of the food chain', should have a staff of about 250 - and growing - within three years.

Moreover, Byrne said, it will not operate in isolation, but will aim to cooperate with national authorities in member states to try and nip future food scares in the bud.

'Many of the past food safety scares have resulted from a fragmented approach to food safety,' Byrne said. 'Time and again problems on the farm or in animal feed have led to problems in food. I believe that both the assessment of risk and the development of legislation should be based on the broadest possible picture.'

As for GMOs, the Commission's goal is to try to keep consumers as informed as possible: 'Our attitude is 'none of us like it', that's a given, but that's just the way it is in practice,' said Gminder, suggesting that new GM products cannot be kept out of the EU forever.

The basic line of the Commission is that the moratorium on authorising new GM products in the EU can be lifted once member states have agreed to the minutiae on labelling and other measures to ensure that consumers can make an informed choice about what they are eating.

To this effect, a new version of a 1990 directive that aims to address the regulation of GMOs in Europe entered into force on 17 October.

And fears about GM content in eggs and dairy products are exaggerated, the spokeswoman said. Even if a chicken eats GM-based feed, she said, 'the mutations do not make it into the eggs'.

Some 50 million hectares of GM crops are currently being cultivated globally by around six million farmers.

Most commercial GM crops, primarily maize and soya, are grown in Canada, the United States and Argentina. In Europe only a few such crops are cultivated for export in Spain.

According to Raymond Destin, director-general of the Brussels-based Confederation of the Food and Drink Industries in the EU (CIAA), the moratorium and other regulations in place to prevent GM products from flooding the EU market merely serve to hamper innovation in Europe's biotech industry.

They could also make food cost more in Europe, as stringent labelling laws even for trace elements of GMO content of 1 or less, mean more costs for European food producers who often rely on imports from nations cultivating GM crops.

'In the end, you will end up having to pay for something that doesn't contain something,' Destin said, due to the 'additional discrimination' such regulations place on the EU food industry versus their restriction-free overseas opponents.

With €600 billion in production value, food and drink is the leading industry in Europe, comprised of some 26,000 companies and 2.6 million employees, according to the CIAA.

'As an industry, we think biotechnology is the wave of the future,' Destin said. Moreover, a survey conducted by the organisation found that two-thirds of European consumers feel their food is actually safe to eat. Conducted in February, it was based on 1,000 phone interviews per country in France, the UK, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, representing approximately 260 million people, or about 70 of EU citizens.

'Thinking of five factors that could negatively affect your health, which one of the following will be most likely to affect you?' the survey asked, listing 'smoking/drinking'; 'environmental pollution'; 'stress'; 'food safety' and 'travel-related accidents', in that order.

Food safety came in fourth: only 11 of respondents claimed it was their primary health concern.

It was beaten by smoking and drinking (38), environmental concerns (20) and stress (18).

Still, what would you answer if asked this question? While we're all concerned about what we eat, it may not be foremost on our minds day in, day out. But that doesn't mean we never think about it.

Food for thought, to be sure.

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