The European Commission is about to finalise a radical overhaul of EU hygiene legislation. It will require farmers, industry and retailers to operate stricter food safety controls.
The EU Commissioner for health and consumer protection, Mr David Byrne, confirmed yesterday that he had almost completed a text consolidating 17 separate food hygiene directives into one legislative text. This was one of the essential steps to restoring consumer confidence in European food, he said.
Mr Byrne told 600 representatives of the world's leading food retailers and suppliers, meeting in Dublin, that he expected the Commission to adopt his proposals this summer.
The reforms would have implications for everyone in the food sector. Producers will be required to adopt the kind of protocols already in place in many large companies.
"It will stretch good hygiene principles to all parts of the food chain, and good agricultural practices will be required at farm level to ensure foods are handled correctly during production," he told the annual congress of CIES, the members of which are responsible for some of the world's best-known food brands and supermarket groups and have a combined annual turnover of $2,800 billion.
The proposed European Food Agency (EFA) will network with food safety authorities in member-states. The heads of these authorities will form a consultative committee affiliated to the authority.
The EFA will also be responsible for implementing a revamped "rapid alert" system (including animal feed). This system, backed by electronic reporting of food safety problems and of environmental contamination, had been a powerful tool in consumer protection, Mr Byrne said.
The recent dispute between France and Britain over beef originated in the perception of divergent scientific opinion. With an EFA, potential for divergence would be minimised, "not because national governments will suddenly trust a body advising the Commission, but because the EFA will be at the centre of a network linking the best available science across the EU."
Following the most recent scientific advice to the Commission confirming that one of four growth hormones routinely given to US cattle was a "complete carcinogen", new legislation would set out motivation for the ban on US beef. He was confident that the new legislation would be "WTO-compatible".
However, he said, the food industry and trading countries could not move forward purely on the basis of sound science. They had to ensure consumer acceptance.
GMOs were a case in point. He believed it was not possible to secure acceptance of genetically modified foods without proper labelling.
This also served to illustrate how the EFA might operate. If it said GM foods were perfectly safe, it would then be up to the Commission, regulators and politicians to decide in what manner and form they should be authorised.
