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In most cases, the European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) science-based recommendations on the safety of new food products are accepted. But the GM saga has encouraged a public distrust in its official scientific expertise. The scientific experts commissioned by EFSA over the years to analyse data on whether GM technologies or products are risky to health or the environment have seen their recommendations challenged time and again by protest groups that claim to have new data on dangers. Nineteen EU member states have registered their decisions to opt out, despite EFSA’s seal of safety.
EFSA does a good job of risk assessment and is reasonably transparent — but to stop distrust from seeping into all areas of its work it needs to do more. Risk assessment is a complicated science to convey to the public and is becoming even more complex with every new potential source of information. EFSA must be transparent about the data that it uses to make individual judgements and their degree of uncertainty. It must transparently assign appropriate weight to different data types that have been collected with varying degrees of scientific rigour.
The agency is on the case. This year, it carried out a public consultation on the communication of uncertainties, and it is rolling out a toolbox of methods to be systematically tested over the next year.
By definition, risk assessment will never be able to deliver simple answers. And concerned citizens, rightly, will never place blind trust in scientific expertise. That is why transparency about both data sources and analysis methods is so important.
Read full, original post: Pick and mix: Food regulators are right to place new forms of data on the safety menu
