Guest PT 1: Comments by Former EU Commissioner

David Bryne, PhD, was the first EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection. He had his share of challenges in the position, including mad cow disease. He received the 2009 Medal of Excellence from Alltech, Inc., and had some interesting comments about food safety and sustainability. Part 1 includes Bryne’s thoughts on food safety. Next week we will run his comments on other animal health issues and sustainability. Here is Part 1:

First of all let me say I am truly delighted to receive this Medal of Excellence Award and I am also truly grateful to Alltech and to its visionary leader Dr. Pearse Lyons for conferring this honor on me.  As you have heard from Karl Dawson, himself a previous recipient of the award, this year’s award is a departure from the norm in the sense that previous honorees have been scientists.  I am definitely not a scientist, but it seems that the focus of this award is on the work that I did while I was a regulator or while I occupied a position in political life. 

It is, of course, valuable in my judgment that Alltech is looking in this direction.  It is understandable that in the past a company like Alltech, which is in fact a scientific company with a huge emphasis on research and development, should honor scientists.  But this new step and shift of emphasis towards the regulator, or I suppose towards somebody who has occupied a political position, is a recognition of the role of the regulator and the politician in bringing forward measures that are normally designed to protect the interest of consumers. I perceive that to be the way Alltech wants this award to be understood, which is not particularly surprising because in the work that Alltech does and in the contact that I have had with the company in more recent years, it is quite clear that in pursuit of what the company calls the ACE principle that there are real concerns for animal welfare, for the consumer, and for preservation of the environment.  So my reaction to this award is that, I suppose I feel on one level very grateful that the industry, that in fact I regulated, must be saying that I did something right.  So thank you, Alltech, for all of that. 

My work as EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection
In the citation for the Medal of Excellence it states that the crisis of mad cow disease was used to create consumer confidence in Europe.  I was the first Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection with responsibility for food safety of the European Union and that became my challenge.  I believe that safety is the single most important ingredient in food, and I have always believed that crisis stimulates reform.  But perhaps it might be worthwhile for me to give you just a little background on what a commissioner is and what the European Commission is.  It is, I suppose, the executive body or government body at federal level in the European Union located in Brussels.  The job I had as Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection was not dissimilar to the Secretary for Health and Human Services here in the United States. 

Food safety in the United States
One of the early speeches made by President Obama was on food safety.  I believe by choosing this as a subject the President identified food safety as an important issue for his administration.  He focused on one particular problem in relation to food safety relating to peanut butter, and he said, “When I heard that peanut products were being contaminated earlier this year, I immediately thought of my 7-year-old daughter Sasha who has peanut butter sandwiches for lunch probably three times a week.”  I am sure many of you who are from the United States could say the same thing.  He went on to say, “No parent should have to worry that their child is going to get sick from their lunch.”  Now having expressed himself in that way, he went on to give fact to his concern by setting up a high level working group made up of cabinet secretaries and senior officials to advise him on what are the appropriate steps to be taken to reform and update the FDA.  He made a promise to overhaul the FDA.  I believe in doing that he is aware of FDA figures that 5,000 people per year die in the US from food-related diseases and that figures like these are similar elsewhere in the world. 

Food safety crises in Europe
Exactly ten years ago this summer we had the same story in the European Union.  Some years earlier we had the first outbreak of mad cow disease, or BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy); initially it was thought that mad cow disease was merely an animal disease.  Some of you, particularly from Europe, may remember seeing a government minister from one of the member states of the EU going on television and feeding his small daughter a hamburger on television.  Some months later it became clear that mad cow disease does skip the species boundary and does move to the human population in the form of variant CJD (Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease), which is a brain wasting disease from which young people can die. 

In the summer of 1999, when I took up my job as commissioner, there was an outbreak of dioxin contamination in Belgium particularly in beef and dairy products.  This combination of food safety issues led to huge concerns among the population of Europe; people became very scared.  Beef consumption went to zero.  Milk and even chocolate bars were removed from the shelves of the shops in Europe.  Supermarket shelves became empty.  At that moment in Europe, food safety became a political issue.  At that moment also, there was a general election in Belgium.  The outgoing government was confidently predicted to win the election, but because of this outbreak and the consumer concerns that arose, the government lost the election.  Not long afterwards in Germany two government ministers were sacked because of food-related problems.  Also in France, Spain and Italy government ministers came under severe pressure and criticism and were in fact lucky to keep their jobs.  Many of you realize, and I certainly realize from a short life in politics, that nothing concentrates the mind of a politician more than the prospect of losing an election. 

The European Food Safety Authority
So what kinds of pressure are brought to bear in the situation like that?  What do we do?  It was my responsibility to come forward with a plan and I quickly realized that to deal with this crisis properly our response had to be credible to the public, had to be science based and rigorous.  We wrote a white paper on food safety; we did this within six months and presented it to the European Parliament and it was accepted.  I then set about amending the law and we wrote a general food law in 18 months, which became law in 2002.  We then set about implementing the legislation that was set out in the white paper. 

Eighty-four pieces of targeted legislation were promised and in the five-year period we delivered 71, and of those 13 were in the pipeline as I left office.  All of those 13 have now come through the system.  The fundamentals of the plan that was put forward were the first establishment of the European Food Safety Authority.  We did not have one at the European level.  We did not have anything in Europe that was like the FDA.  We needed something like that, but we needed a special type of food authority in the sense that the public demanded it be science based, free of political influence, and seen to be independent. 

Traceability
In our legislation we identified that the need to reinforce the concept of farm to fork was absolutely critical and within that, traceability and labeling were of fundamental importance.  We reinforced and put into place a rapid-alert system and required that there would be a mandatory recall of any product which was contaminated so that the public would be protected.  That mandatory aspect of it is, I think, unique in the world. 

It is certainly different from here in the US where it is voluntary although I know in the US there are discussions underway in relation to that issue.  But we felt that it was mandatory and that meant that the law we brought through Parliament gave me the responsibility at an executive level to identify whether there was a problem with some particular food so that I could direct that it be removed from the supermarket shelves of Europe.  Throughout all of this, I believed and still believe that traceability is the most important of these principles.  This core value requires the tracking of food and feed and their ingredients at all stages of production distribution and sales by food companies.  Traceability allows you in a crisis to act within 24 hours, so that unsafe food can be ordered from the marketplace.  President Obama has also expressed this to be one of his ambitions. 

But traceability is not only a principle and process of risk management that must apply to food and feed, it is also necessary in animal identification.  It is important to be in a position to identify animal diseases to notify people very quickly so that the spread of disease can be contained.  This is one of the ambitions that has been expressed by the Secretary of Agriculture here in the US with his national animal identification scheme proposal which is currently being proposed and debated.  At a political level, I know it has some opposition but if it goes through it will be a reinforcement of what we have in Europe and what will extend the capacity of those involved in the industry to give more protection to animal and human health.  Only traceability will give you this rapid response to allow the removal of food and feed from the market where there is a health risk and to identify sick animals. 

Look for Part 2 of this speech next week.

Editor’s Note: This commentary is sponsored by Alltech. Through 29 years of research-driven product development, Alltech has created a range of natural solutions for the feed and food industries. For more information, please visit the Web sites at www.alltech.com.

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