Foundations of EU Food Law and Policy - Ten Years of European Food Safety Authority

This volume provides a contextual analysis of EU food law and policy by bringing together for the first time the viewpoints of academics, policymakers, industry representatives as well as those of food practitioners who are exposed daily to this emerging area of study and practice. It is timed to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the establishment of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Its broader purpose, however, is to discuss EFSA’s future role within the rapidly evolving EU food law regime while at the same identifying new trends. The Authority and the EU substantive food law regime are, and have always been since their very inception, intertwined to the point that they cannot be unambiguously separated. Hence the methodological choice made in this book to focus on EFSA in order to apprehend the broader, substantive normative framework of EU food law while at the same time discussing substantive EU food law with the aim to better grasp EFSA’s rationale and future trajectories. Each chapter discusses how EFSA's role has evolved (the diachronic view) and identifies what it should have done differently (the normative view) while presenting an overall assessment of how the agency has discharged its mandate. Our hope is to have succeeded in addressing some of the most frequent criticisms directed at EFSA and its underlying food regulatory regime. The challenge is to differentiate the criticisms based on ill-informed, factual errors and misrepresentation from those that are genuinely well founded and require creative regulatory action. In general, the wealth of perspectives gathered in this volume seems to demystify some of the common claims portraying the Authority as either ‘pro-industry’ (e.g. in its scientific assessment of GMOs) or ‘anti-industry’ (e.g. in its scientific assessment of health claims). Overall, the Authority emerges as belonging to a balanced, yet improvable, food legal system that deserves permanent scrutiny, guidance and judgment. That is the expectation of 500 million EU citizens, the daily clients of this very system. Although predominantly grounded in EU administrative law, this book represents one of the first contextual analyses of a EU agency. As such, it nurtures the ambition to inspire more creative research around the functioning of these archetypally European, yet atypical, creatures and could be applicable to the understanding of other sister agencies