Regulation for Safe Food: A Comparison of Five European Countries (original) (raw)
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The Evolution of Food Safety Policy-making Institutions in the UK, EU and Codex Alimentarius
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After the British government announced in March that a novel fatal human disease (now called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) had emerged and was almost certainly caused by consuming BSE-contaminated food, national and international authorities have been struggling to deal with the consequences of a serious loss of public confidence in the safety of foods and in food safety policy-making institutions. One of the main ways in which governments and officials have responded to those challenges has been by initiating a broad range of structural and procedural reforms to the ways in which public policies are decided, legitimated and communicated. This paper outlines some of the more important respects in which national and international authorities have changed the ways in which they assess and manage the risks to human consumers of foodborne hazards. The focus is on developments in the UK, the EU and, at the global level, the Codex Alimentarius Commission; the period covered runs from the late s until summer . The discussion focuses on the case for separating the responsibilities for regulating and sponsoring the agricultural and food industries, for conducting risk appraisals and decision-making in open and democratically accountable ways and for drawing on experts representing a wide range of interests and expertise rather than on a narrow industry-based group. The paper concludes by indicating some key structural and procedural conditions for effectively differentiating the scientific from the political aspects of risk appraisal and decision-making, and then for coupling them together in ways that would provide both scientific and democratic legitimacy.
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The food safety sector has grown extensively during the last two decades. Both in Europe and in the United States, we can observe a surge of regulatory activity on the one hand, and institutional proliferation accompanied by technological expertise for the purpose of monitoring, on the other hand. At the same time, mechanisms have been installed to allow a faster and more effective reaction to food-related infection outbreaks.Where do we stand today with respect to food safety regulation? And what are the main challenges faced for the future? This is the question addressed by this article. We first consider the European food safety legislative system, as this has emerged over the last years. The European system represents the first comprehensive food safety regulation framework that is tailored to modern challenges. The second section considers the governance structures operating at national and international levels as well as in the private sector for dealing with food safety. The third section compares the different approaches to food safety in two key sub-sectors, namely chemical contamination and microbiological safety. Based on this analysis, we outline in the concluding section the main challenges facing the food safety sector in the future.
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Journal of European Integration, 2010
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The Architecture of Food Safety Control in the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union
This survey of food safety control systems in the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union is designed to assess the degree to which the present systems in the two unions can ensure effective food safety control, thus ensuring the free movement of goods within the single market. The analysis spans both central and country level institutions for ensuring food safety in the countries of these two economic unions. We conclude that there are cardinal differences between the food safety systems in the two unions both at the central and country levels. The overhaul of the EU food safety control system in the 2000s led to a significant transfer of decision making authority to EU institutions. Very little, if any, of the EU-type central edifice exists in the Eurasian Economic Union.