Scientists want authenticity returned to FSA
The news comes as further pressure was put on the FSA’s resources by chancellor George Osborne’s Budget decision to cut 2% more from its funding over the next two years.
Government departments, such as the FSA, have been told to deliver a 1% cut to their day-to-day budgets in both 2013–14 and 2014–15. The impact on the FSA will be a reduction to its current budget of about £1M in both 2013–14 and 2014–15, which it aims to find from monies not yet allocated.
The FSA said: “We don’t expect frontline services, such as meat inspection, to be affected.”
Andrew Rhodes, FSA director of operations, will be taking part in a free one-hour webinar on the lessons to be leaned from the horsemeat crisis on May 16. See the end of this article for more details.
Criticised as flawed
The government’s decision to transfer policy responsibility for labelling, standards and composition of food in England from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) when it came to power in 2010 have been criticised as flawed given the recent horsemeat scandal.
While the FSA retains a food safety remit, the FSA’s chief scientist Dr Andrew Wadge and other members of the General Advisory Committee on Science (GACS) which scrutinises the FSA's use of science questioned the logic of transferring authenticity policy to DEFRA at its meeting last month.
“It has raised questions about that and about the division of responsibilities,” said Wadge. “I find it hard to see how a fraud issue does not become a food safety issue.”
The chairman of GACS, Professor Colin Blakemore, and other committee members supported this view. GACS member Professor Colin Dennis, who stands down as president of the Institute of Food Science and Technology in April, said: “The split of responsibilities is a nonsense if you look at the FSA’s strategy … it seems ridiculous to split fraud from public health.”
Blakemore argued that the government’s decision had undermined the ability of the FSA to use science to deal with these sorts of incidents. He won support for setting up a special GACS working group to investigate the lessons that needed to be learned from the horsemeat scandal.
Failure to predict
However, Wadge accepted that there had also been a failure to predict the latest horsemeat incidents especially given previous cases of fraud, such as the Sudan 1 in chilli incident in 2005 and the Chinese melamine in milk scandal in 2008.
A link had not been made between top level 'horizon scanning’ activities about where fraudulent incidents were likely and market intelligence on the ground to identify horsemeat fraud, he said.
“There were clearly opportunities for those people with devious minds to make money,” said Wadge. It was the Food Safety Authority of Ireland that first identified that a problem of contaminated beef products existed across the EU.
Wadge proposed a more targeted approach to identifying fraud in the future, combining “risk-based sampling” of foods with better market intelligence. Testing alone was not the answer, he said.
Joining Rhodes in our free one hour webinar on the lessons to be learned from the horsemeat crisis will be Professor Tony Hines, of Leatherhead Food Research, and Hilary Ross, partner in the business law firm DWF. Book your free place here.
