Catherine Geslain-Lanéelle

Thank you very much for your kind invitation to participate to this meeting today and in particular to the Finnish Authorities for hosting this meeting and enabling us to have today’s exchanges. In fact I believe that this is the first time that the Executive Director of EFSA has participated to the Heads of Agencies meeting and I must say that I wish to seize this opportunity to open a dialogue with you in this Forum about EFSA’s work and in particular EFSA’s plans to build closer collaboration and networking with national authorities. Yesterday at the Advisory Forum meeting – which many of you attended - we continued to pursue our objectives to build greater collaboration with the members of the Forum and looked at a concrete strategy for strengthen networking and collaboration between EFSA and Members States, including identifying specific projects on which we can build.

But this is not all that I have in mind for building greater networking with Member States - Not only does EFSA wish to engage with those bodies and authorities in the Members States who are responsible for risk assessment activities, EFSA is also keen to have strong collaborative relationships with risk managers, both at the EU and national level. And this draws me to the main subject of my intervention today: managing the risk assessment and risk management interface. As someone who has worked previously as a risk manager and assessor - and who has worked in systems where risk assessment and management are together when I was in the Commission and others where they are separated - as was the case when I was in France - I have indeed been able to see the strengths and weakness of both and formed views on how the relationship between assessment and management should be handled.

EFSA was established in a climate of lack of confidence on the side of consumers, industry, trading partners, EU and national risk managers. It was felt that confidence in the EU system of developing food safety measures had been severely damaged by the scares of the 1990s. The scares revealed that in some cases there were possible conflicts of interest when risk managers and risk assessors were the same people. Codex Alimentarius had identified at that time that risk assessment should be functionally separated from risk management in the general principles of risk analysis and this established the backdrop to the thinking in Brussels and in several Member States at that time.

EFSA was created to provide the functional and structural separation of the two risk analysis activities formerly carried out by the Commission, and this is where we find ourselves today.

I believe that in order for this system to work to the benefit of the Community interest and ensure that the most appropriate risk management measures can be developed to protect consumers there have to be three key activities at the interface:

Firstly – close dialogue between risk assessors and managers is vital. Working in a functionally separated structure does not mean that the assessors and managers work in isolation – if they did the scientific work would not necessarily be relevant to the decision maker’s tasks. EFSA is part of the overall system at the EU level for the development of food and feed safety, nutrition, animal health and welfare and plant protection and plant health legislation and we have to be integrated fully and accountable within that system. EFSA must also be linked to the risk management networks at the national and EU level. EFSA staff work closely with their colleagues in many parts of the Commission to exchange information and ensure that questions put to EFSA are appropriate and understood and of course Commission staff are able to participate to the meetings of the scientific committee and panels. This provides an important and tangible link between risk assessment and managers in the Commission. In this way EFSA can support decision makers develop targeted, appropriate and proportionate risk management measures to a specific matter.

Risk managers must also play their part in providing EFSA with information that is of relevance to the risk assessment process – for example - the result of some national and community control programmes - which can provide indications of exposure and nature of a risk - and thus help build an overall picture of the risk under consideration. This dialogue and exchanges enable EFSA to provide the support and scientific advice to the overall risk analysis system so that risk managers can take decision fully informed by independent, high quality, and especially relevant scientific opinion. This is why I intend to continue to build dialogue with risk managers both at the EU and national level to ensure that EFSA is fully integrated into the overall risk analysis process in Europe and able to keep decision makers informed of the latest EFSA findings.

Secondly - risk assessors have to be proactive and reactive to provide the risk managers with timely information. Risk assessors have to be able to identify emerging risk (and issues) to ensure that risk managers can stay ‘ahead of the game’ and take measure that help prevent a probable risk being realized. When an urgency arises risk assessors have to be able to respond to the needs of the risk managers to provide advice in the shortest timeframe so that risk managers can act. While it is important that risk assessors provide the best scientific advice – it is not acceptable in urgent situations for risk managers to have to unduly delay the development of risk limitation measures because the risk assessors would prefer to await for more scientific evidence to become available allowing a scientific opinion based on a more comprehensive risk assessment. As we have done already several times in the past on an ad hoc basis (on illegal dyes, ITX, semicarbazide and others). I am working with the Science Directorate in EFSA to turn this ad hoc approach into procedures allowing us to be more reactive in urgent situations, and I have asked the Scientific Committee to look at how EFSA could provide timely responses which are less defined than a full risk assessment but still very useful for the risk manager. Obviously, time pressure should never result in advice of questionable scientific quality.

Thirdly – In terms of chronology it is true that often the risk assessment information is available before the risk managers can make any public statement about risk management measures and in urgent situations this may create a smaller margin to manoeuvre than desirable for the risk manager. It is important, however, to share information and discuss approaches with risk managers, keeping each other informed about the timing and nature of communications activities while still fulfilling our obligation to communicate independently. We take a broad view in EFSA as you will be aware - we share our communications, press releases and scientific reports and opinions, in advance of their publication with risk managers, national food agencies and authorities, international organizations and stakeholders concerned by a particular public announcement. I am indeed working with the Communications department in EFSA at developing greater collaboration and planning with the Commission services to further enhance this – so that we can indeed move closer to the coherence we desire and which consumers require.

Whether the risk assessors and risk managers are in the same structure or in different bodies - the general principles for managing the two complementary but different parts of the risk analysis process are the same – dialogue, collaboration and information exchanges, appropriate responsiveness, and coherent communications.

At the end of the day we are trying to find the best ways to protect consumers from risks – each organization playing its own specific but complementary role. Independence is important to the scientific credibility of risk assessments but this has to be managed responsibly to ensure that this does not lead to isolation and irrelevance.

Risk assessors and risk managers have the same goal. Consumers will judge us by our results and our effectiveness in creating an environment which allows them to enjoy, in confidence, safe and nutritious foods.

Thank you.