Food, risk and politics: Scare, scandal and crisis - insights into the risk politics of food safety 9781847793355

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Food, risk and politics

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to Elizabeth and Rachel

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Food, risk and politics Scare, scandal and crisis – insights into the risk politics of food safety Ed Randall

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Ed Randall 2009 The right of Ed Randall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 7230 7 hardback ISBN  978 0 7190 7231 4 paperback First published 2009 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents

   Preface    Acknowledgements 1  Introduction 2  Salmonella and media intrusion: food safety policy and    politics upset 3  An inspector calls: Pennington, E. coli and disaster science 4  BSE and vCJD – still crazy after all these years 5  GMOs and food – is anyone listening? 6  Dioxin – scares without borders 7  Foot-and-mouth disease – who’s panicking now? 8  Conclusion    Bibliography    Index

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page vi ix 1 31 49 70 90 114 142 162 209 227

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Preface

This is a book about food safety, risk perception and politics. It makes use of a series of case studies, which have been chosen because of their inherent interest and the opportunity they afford to consider and assess the political and social significance of food scares, scandals and crises. The six case studies – concerned with salmonella and E. coli O157 infections, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), Gen­etically Modified Organisms (GMOs), dioxin contamination in food, and foot-andmouth disease – offer a rich source of material for anyone who wants to examine the parts that the mass media and politics play in generating and managing (rather badly in most cases) public alarm about food safety and food-related risks. While Britain, which has seemed to posses magnetic properties so far as food-related controversies are concerned, provides most of the cases, the discussion of risk politics across the pages that follow is undoubtedly relevant to many other countries in which there is a complex and dynamic relationship between public-policy making, risk reporting, food production and retailing, and the behaviour and beliefs of the general public, whether as citizens and voters or purchasers and consumers of food. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between popular risk perception, media coverage of food safety issues and the insights that have been afforded to students of risk politics by social scientists, most notably the social psychologists who have been responsible for the development of what has come to be known as the psychometric paradigm for the study of human risk perception. The same social psychologists have also been responsible for the development and promotion of the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF), which has been the source of many of the key organising ideas found in this book. While SARF first emerged from the work of social psychologists, most notably Roger and Jeanne Kasperson and Paul Slovic, it has subsequently attracted and stimulated students of risk drawn from a variety of disciplines, including politics. All of them wish to make better sense of the ways in which vi

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Preface popular anxieties about risks – including those arising from concerns about unsafe foods – have been influenced by media representations and coverage of hazards thought to threaten human health and well-being, and the ways in which risk communication and popular risk perception frame political action and public policy, including risk management by governments. This book is particularly concerned with exploring how exaggerated and distorted perceptions of actual and alleged exposure to food hazards can lead to inappropriate and disproportionate behaviour on the part of both the general public and those who shoulder the responsibility for fashioning appropriate, effective and proportionate food policies, including food safety policies. If risk communication is reliant on a mass media that is prone to transmitting misleading and unbalanced information about risk (and there are good reasons to believe that is the case) then students of risk politics need to consider whether there are alternative (and superior) channels of communication that can reduce the likelihood that the public will be grossly misinformed about both the nature and significance of specific risks. While SARF can (and does) help to shine a strong light on the media’s role in amplifying popular fears, something that emerges clearly from the case studies at the heart of this book, SARF was not designed to serve as either an inspiration or a source for a programme of political and institutional change. Such a programme is undoubtedly needed to improve popular risk communication and to engage the public more directly in food policy, including food safety policy. We must look elsewhere if we want to create more reliable and democratic instruments for the communication, comprehension, public discussion and management of risk: instruments that are superior to the popular media we have inherited and to governments that all too often appear cowed by the possibility of unfavourable and electorally damaging media coverage. This book is most concerned with the need to develop better means of risk communication; means that make it practicable for risk assessors and publicpolicy makers to exchange opinions and information with the public they exist to serve. SARF is a valuable resource for helping us to understand the distortions and misunderstandings that appear to characterise what Nick Davies, the author of Flat Earth News, has described, in his penetrating analysis and exposé of the contemporary and increasingly deceptive worlds of press and television reporting, as mass communication enterprises driven largely, if not exclusively, by accountants and accountancy, rather than by journalists and journalism; enterprises, he insists, that are increasingly built upon falsehood, distortion and propaganda (2008: 13–23). Amongst those academics, campaigners and others who are deeply interested in both popular risk perception and risk politics there is a major division of opinion about whether it is possible or, more to the point, desirable to vii

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Preface trust the public when it comes to the management of risk. Some distinguished commentators and observers of risk politics, such as Cass Sunstein, fear that popular anxieties, in contemporary wired societies, are a constant threat to the intelligent and informed management of risk. Sunstein fears that risk managers will simply not be able to do their job properly if they cannot be insulated from currents of popular opinion that are fed and stoked by purveyors of news for whom ratings, sensation and profitability are inseparable. Others, such as Paul Slovic, the psychologist whose contribution to the study of risk perception and the social amplification of risk has been so notable and so influential, take, perhaps surprisingly, a different view. While Slovic acknowledges the great influence that media organisations can have on popular beliefs about risk and is well aware of weighty arguments about the dangers of social cascades leading to poor decisions about risk, both individual and collective, he insists that democratic societies must do the best that they can to respect the values and beliefs of all their members, including values and beliefs that bear on society’s responses to risk. Managing risk intelligently and democratically is undoubtedly a great challenge but it is a challenge that we cannot evade and one that we should not try to avoid; a view that is shared by the author of this book.

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Acknowledgements

This book has taken longer to complete than I had originally planned and those who are closest to me, Liz and Rachel, have shown me much greater understanding for much longer than I had any right to expect. I want to acknowledge the encouragement and the very considerable support that they have both given me throughout the enterprise. I also want to acknowledge the great benefits I have gained from the advice of a friend and close academic colleague, Tony Butcher. Tony has read drafts of all eight chapters that make up Food, risk and politics – some of them several times – and he has been critical and constructive in more or less equal measure, and at just the right times and in just the right proportions to help me complete the project. I have been able to draw on an extensive literature and one that has grown enormously in recent years; a literature that deals with the complexities of human risk perception, food safety, media coverage of risk and risk politics. I must, therefore, acknowledge my considerable intellectual debts, most especially my debts to two American academics, Paul Slovic and Cass Sunstein. In my eyes – although I know they have strong disagreements with one another – both of them represent traditions, in the social and policy sciences, that encourage and celebrate openness and intellectual honesty and which demonstrate great generosity in sharing ideas. They both exemplify traditions in academe that I greatly admire, which I hope have been reflected in the pages of Food, risk and politics. I have also been greatly influenced by – and the arguments in this book have greatly benefited from – the writings of two Britons; one of them a journalist who is amongst the very best in his profession, Nick Davies, and the other an academic, Albert Weale. Weale has demonstrated time and again that good English and the intelligent and accessible discussion of political ideas are not inimical to one another. I would particularly like to thank the anonymous reviewer who considered and commented on the original proposal for this book and helped to persuade ix

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Acknowledgements Manchester University Press that the ideas, book structure and goals I had set out in my proposal for Food, risk and politics were worthy of their support. Manchester University Press, most especially Tony Mason and Jennifer Howard, went on to show great patience in letting me work at my own pace and rescheduled the date for final delivery of the completed manuscript, so that I was able to accommodate a number of competing and pressing demands. I want to acknowledge Tony and Jenny’s continuing support for and commitment to the publication of Food, risk and politics. I would also like to thank Frances Hackeson for her hard work in copy-editing and preparing the proof. While not everyone who reads this book will agree with its conclusions, especially its emphasis on the desirability and practicability of strengthening public deliberation in the risk politics of food safety, I hope that all its readers will find it engaging and interesting to read and will feel able to express their disagreements as well as their support; most of all I hope that they are able to do so in ways that contribute to what I sincerely believe is an important and widely shared goal: that of managing risks, most especially food-related risks, more intelligently and democratically. We all make mistakes – including the author of this book. I am ready to acknowledge mistakes in this book – although I pray that there are not very many of them. I hope fervently that however many mistakes I have made it will be possible for everyone, including myself, to learn from them.



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1

Introduction

Food, risk and the competition for our attention This is a book about food scares and scandals, most of them British but not exclusively so. It is a book about the way in which food safety has become entwined with contemporary politics and the politics of risk in particular. Of course the safety of food has always been a matter of public concern. If British politics since the late 1980s has been marked by an exceptionally high level of interest in food safety and the risks associated with unsafe foods, we are not alone in being fearful about the safety of what we eat. Keir Waddington has compared the crisis over the safety of beef in the 1990s, attributable to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) infected animals being identified as the source of variant CJD (vCJD), with bovine TB in Victorian Britain; ‘[when TB was also found to be] capable of crossing the species barrier to infect humans, and in particular children’ (2002). But food safety issues have always been with us, as Colin Tudge, the science writer and journalist, has put it: ‘Food is intrinsically hazardous’ (2003: 148). What he meant by this was that, since time immemorial, the plants we use for food and the animals we farm and husband for our meals have represented a risk to human health which we have had to manage and, by and large, have managed successfully as our growing numbers and improving health both testify. Tudge suggests that we should be ‘grateful to ancient farmers and breeders who produced a range of crops that are reasonably safe … from wild ancestors that could be lethal’ (2003: 148). Our ancestors could also be said to have had much greater problems than we do with the storage and transportation of food; yet they found ways and means, including drying, smoking and pickling, to keep food safe and edible. However, the confidence we should have – in a scientific and highly productive age – in our ability to grow and obtain food that is safe and nutritious, after tens of thousand of years of becoming more knowledgeable about selecting, breeding, transporting and preparing what we 

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Food, risk and politics need to eat and enjoy eating, seems to have been under steady assault. In an age when, for the wealthiest and most fortunate of us, there is more than enough to eat and its quality, by almost all reasonable measures, is as high as it ever has been, its safety, in contrast, appears to raise more and more questions and invite greater and graver doubts. Why is that? What can we learn from the crises, scares and scandals that have brought food safety issues regularly onto the front pages of our newspapers? Are modern food scares and crises symptomatic of something that is profoundly wrong with our agriculture and/or our politics? What makes us anxious, even fearful, about the safety of the food available to us and how should our elected representatives and public-policy makers react to public anxiety about food safety? Does the strength of public reactions to food scares and scandals suggest that we are seriously misguided and misinformed, or should they direct our attention to matters that we have, thus far, failed to address or been poorly equipped to address? These are amongst the most important questions that I intend to address in the course of this book about food, risk and politics. Two food-related safety issues, both a continuing source of concern to large numbers of people, have deeply affected and shaped contemporary British and European politics and had a political and economic impact that is truly international. One of those issues concerns the transmissibility and ultimately the human toll that is likely to result from the human counterpart to BSE; a disease in cattle apparent only since the mid-1980s that has been labelled the cause of vCJD. Variant CJD first came to public attention in Britain in the late 1980s but its true political impact only became apparent in the mid-1990s and its longterm impact on human health remains uncertain. The other food safety issue, though that may be a rather misleading description for a ‘safety issue’ that has been widely anticipated since scientific advances in the understanding and application of genetic science (but never confirmed), concerns the genetic modification of food resulting from the incorporation of genetically modified material into plants and animals and, by design or accident, into the wider environment. Both issues have focused public attention on the role that experts of all kinds, including experts in public health and safety, play in the formulation and implementation of public policy. Both have directed attention to the interaction between experts, politicians and organised interests, such as farmers, corporations and large retail concerns, in the fashioning of agricultural policy and the formulation and review of policies to protect the wider public interest in ensuring that food is safe to eat. Both have highlighted and stimulated public interest in, and concern about, the part that science plays in the development of agriculture, and in protecting the population from any dangers that may arise from agricultural innovations and developments. They have provided 

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Introduction regular and often very dramatic grist for the mill of modern mass communications (a particular concern of this book). Food safety stories are good news, in at least one sense, for major media outlets. They are capable of generating intense public interest. Bad news about food seems to be especially alarming and, for that reason, interesting and engaging. Subjects that engage the public interest and, perhaps more importantly, the public’s strongest emotions are difficult for either elected representatives or the major purveyors of news to ignore. And the biggest news stories depend, for the public interest they arouse and for much of their political salience and potency, not on bare statistics about danger or comparative risk but on the way in which they engage our feelings: a particularly important political point when it comes to designing and maintaining institutions that both represent and engage the public in food-related risks and safety issues. The most knowledgeable and experienced enquirers into the public’s response to stories about the risks that threaten human well-being have concluded that hazardousness, by itself, often fails to obtain or hold our attention. However, when hazardousness is combined with such things as personal vulnerability, ideas about blameworthiness and a sense of injustice they can give rise to outrage. It is the potential for outrage that makes particular food hazards especially newsworthy and politically potent (Sandman, 1987: 21–22). The fear of death or serious injury provoked by news of a previously unsuspected threat to health associated with food may be unwarranted or disproportionate but our reaction to news about actual or potential food-related threats to our own well-being or the welfare of others with whom we find it easiest to identify, undoubtedly has the ability to radically alter our decisions about what we eat and where we purchase it. And, in the search for explanations about why a particular threat has arisen or is being reported as serious, we may well find that the list of those who can be blamed or held responsible, in some way, for things that are said to be going wrong, extends well beyond those who sold us our food or grew it in the first place. The strength of public reactions to news of unsafe food is as instructive as the speed with which major retailers react to adverse publicity about products they display and offer for sale. Although there are many issues, including information about price and nutritional value, to which consumers and retailers react, our strongest and most widely reported reactions have come to focus on the safety of food. In different ways, and with greatly varying degrees of sophistication, books such as Not on the Label (Lawrence, 2004), the ironically titled Don’t Worry:(It’s Safe to Eat) (Rowell, 2003a), Sold Out: The True Cost of Supermarket Shopping (Young, 2004), Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets (Blythman, 2004), Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (Nestle, 2003), Fast Food Nation (Schlosser, 2001), John Humphrys’ The Great Food Gamble (2001) and 

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Food, risk and politics Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death? How Pessimism, Paranoia, and a Misguided Media are Leading us Towards Disaster (Cohl, 1997) all emphasise a shared interest in and sensitivity to information about the ways in which the production, sale and consumption of food may be affecting the health and safety of modern consumers. In addition they add, along with the vast numbers of column inches now devoted to food safety scares and retailers’ public relations and information campaigns, to the impression that there is a great deal to worry about: after all, when it comes to food safety, how can there be so much smoke without fire? The printed and web-based output of academic and other specialist commentators on food safety issues is matched by that of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and lobby groups, government departments and their advisers, commercial organisations, including the major food retailers, biotechnology firms and others, including farmers’ representatives. Anyone who starts pulling on any of the threads that link our lives to the food economy will quickly discover the legions of direct and indirect interests, commercial and non-commercial, that are involved in agricultural production and food retailing. Almost all appear to have a strong desire to communicate with us, especially about the safety of food. The torrent of material we receive about food safety and the strength of the public commitments, to defending our safety made by all kinds of organisations, by ensuring the wholesomeness of the food we eat, adds to the impression that food safety is one of our greatest contemporary concerns and that it is recognised as such by the majority of those who vie, directly and indirectly, for our custom and our votes. Whether it is Greenpeace, with its True Food Network, serving the US public, or Shopper’s Guide to GM serving the UK public, or the Soil Association battling for the attention and involvement of the concerned public in Building an Organic Future, food safety has become one of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding fields for issue entrepreneurs and the popular media. Major food retailers are well aware of the competition they face from public interest groups in winning and keeping the public’s attention and invest heavily in persuading the shopping public, as well as those who are elected to represent them, that the products they sell are safe and beneficial. Sainsbury’s proudly and confidently announces its Commitment to Food, including its heavy investment in safety and quality, and its commercial rivals do the same. Tesco, the largest among them, is at pains to explain that ‘sourcing food of the highest safety and quality is [its] utmost priority’. By their own account (Monsanto UK, 1999; Baldwin Gilbert, 2002) and the accounts of highly sceptical observers, such as Rampton and Stauber (2002, see also Stauber and Rampton, 1995), commercial interests of all kinds now invest and have very good reasons to invest heavily in influencing public opinion about the safety of food and the safety of technologies, particularly new technologies, 

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Introduction employed in food production. Even producer interests that have traditionally had relatively little or no interest in communicating directly with consumers, such as the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), have begun to display a growing enthusiasm for trying to influence public opinion, not just specialist publicpolicy makers; the NFU, via its nfuonline and Red Tractor (an independent quality mark meant to reassure UK consumers about food quality and safety), now offers advice and information about food safety and related issues, supplying answers to public questions in a style that is clearly designed to appeal to those who shop for food at supermarkets but have little or no direct knowledge of or involvement in its production. Government itself has, often reactively rather than proactively, given increasing attention to food safety and become focused on communicating its growing interest in the subject of food safety. The UK Government, scientific bodies and specialist committees responding to its specific invitations for information and analysis, along with parliamentary committees and an army of unofficial and official investigators concerned with food safety, has been responsible for launching major investigations into food safety issues at the rate of more than one a year since 1988. The body of public documentation that has accumulated and is now associated with food safety issues – its cost of production as well as the expertise required and deployed to produce it and the political attention it attracts – all bear witness to the fact that food safety issues rival almost any other major topic of interest and concern to Britain’s political and media classes. Major state papers dealing with food safety published in the last twenty years include the House of Commons Agricultural Committee Report, published in 1989, on salmonella in eggs, the Pennington Report on an E. coli O157 outbreak in Scotland in 1996, the James Report (1997), recommending the creation of an independent Food Standards Agency, the mammoth Phillips Inquiry Report into BSE, which was published in 2000, Dr Iain Anderson’s Enquiry Report, Foot-and-Mouth 2001: Lessons to be Learned which was published in 2002, and two weighty GM Science Review Reports published respectively in 2003 and 2004. Official papers have been matched by a plenitude of responses to Government reports and rival analyses from non-governmental sources. If, in the past, when it came to food policy the adequacy of the food supply was the paramount concern of government and public, the volume of material published on food safety and the level of attention given to the subject in recent years suggests that this concern has been supplanted by an almost universal anxiety about the safety of our food.



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Food, risk and politics Life, risk and perspective But how reasoned and reasonable are our anxieties about the risks we have come to associate with the food we eat? Not particularly, is the answer that has come time and time again from those who have explored how closely human perception of risk ties in with the risks that surround us. The British Medical Association’s (BMA) guide Living with Risk notes that ‘one of [our] major findings was that people’s perception of risk often [bore] no relation to the real risk’. Overestimation and underestimation of risk and personal vulnerability are widespread. As the BMA found, it is common to overestimate ‘the magnitude of rare or isolated causes of death and to underestimate … common causes such as heart disease’ (BMA, 1990: xi). The implications of this for personal behaviour, for the conduct of our politics and for public policy making are profound; especially when it is realised how easily we can be moved to make unnecessary and potentially damaging changes to the way we live, by fear and anxiety on the one hand, while continuing to live and behave as though we are truly ignorant of some of the greatest threats to our well-being on the other. Although people die, as more than twenty did in Scotland in 1986, as a result of infection with E. coli O157, death is rarely the immediate outcome of eating unsafe food; it is incomparably more likely to be the consequence of not having enough to eat. The damage done to us by what we eat tends to accumulate over long ­periods and has far more to do with our patterns of food consumption and how much we eat than the properties intrinsic to particular foods. It is instructive, and in some ways disturbing, to consider relative risk and human exposure to a range of hazards, in an attempt to put the dangers of consuming different foods into context. Of course, one of the things that is important and highly relevant to our perception of risk and our tolerance of particular risks is how they relate to our everyday behaviour and activities; there is, after all, nothing more ordinary and routine for most human beings than eating. It is one thing to engage in an unusual activity in the knowledge that it carries a high risk and another to be exposed to risk in the course of doing something that we expect will be safe; something that we feel able, indeed entitled, to take for granted. Eating in safety is something that the vast majority of people in the world’s wealthiest societies believe they are entitled to take for granted. Indeed, in a book that focuses on political and public events in the last twenty years, it is worth noting how much our ideas about what we can reasonably take for granted and assume to be safe have changed in the course of the last 200 years. Until the end of the eighteenth century there was little scientific understanding of the basis for everyday threats to health. The transmission of infection was 

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Introduction not understood and even when, in the 1850s, John Snow gained empirical insights into the spread of cholera through the public water supply, the role of the bacterium vibrio cholerae, in the spread and development of the disease, was not then amenable to scientific study and explanation. Snow’s statistical approach to the spread of cholera announced the arrival of the public health expert and it also revealed complexities in the study and explanation of human vulnerability to disease that were far from easy to convey to the untutored, most particularly to those without a strong grasp of statistics and epidemiological methods; that is still by far the greater proportion of the population. The problems of comprehending the statistical basis of expert risk analyses have grown as time has gone on. While other processes and activities, such as those that now secure safe drinking water (free of pathogens), which were hardwon and based on the development of expert knowledge and techniques, are now simply taken for granted. Our selective and partial understanding of risk and our individual exposure to risks has been extensively documented. In 1990, when the BMA updated the original version of Living with Risk it offered the following information about the risk of an individual dying in any given year from a number of different causes. Smoking no more than ten cigarettes a day exposes millions of people to great risk of premature death. Smoking is directly responsible for more than 100,000 deaths a year in the UK, it stated. For the purposes of putting different risks in context Living with Risk notes that, beyond the age of forty and taking account of all so-called natural causes of death, the estimated risk/probability of death was 1 in 850. The risk of death attributable to smoking, for those who smoked ten cigarettes a day, was 1 in 200. The risk of death associated with playing football, in any one year, was estimated at 1 in 25,000 while, at the extreme, the estimate of the risk of being killed as a result of being struck by lightning was put at 1 in 10 million. Another remote possibility, death attributable to radiation released from ‘a nearby nuclear power station’, was also put at 1 in 10 million. It is hard to disagree with those who say that such statistics do not capture or reflect our sense of vulnerability and the relativities of risk. They have little apparent connection with the strength of our feelings about the risks we are exposed to. The presence of cigarette smoke and smokers in many of the environments non-smokers used routinely to enter did not appear to generate the levels of anxiety or, until relatively recently, political interest that we associate with the announcement of plans to construct a nuclear power station nearby. Some have a strong faith in their ability, when provided with full and accurate information – and details of the kinds of statistical relativities referred to above – to adjust behaviour and beliefs. Others consider that humans have a very limited capacity, in the ordinary course of events, to alter their behaviour 

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Food, risk and politics or consciously manage the way in which information about risk is processed. Such doubts about our ability to deal either emotionally or intellectually with information about relative risk led some social scientists to speculate about the results that can flow from mass communications concerning hazards, especially previously unrecognised ones. Is it possible to trigger cascades of fear which may undermine a balanced approach to public policy-making and make honest risk management impractical in liberal democracies? At least, for a time, in the immediate aftermath of a food or other highly publicised scare (Hirshleifer, 1995: 1, 26–28). The authors of the BMA’s Living with Risk nail their colours to the mast and declare, when discussing the spread of AIDS and its implications for human sexual behaviour, that: ‘… witch-hunting and panic will not help any more than it did in the case of cholera, plague or leprosy in the past; all diseases which were regarded with superstitious terror but … successfully brought under control by rational and scientifically valid public health measures’ (1990: 72). It is of course our recognition that human judgements in response to risk are often fallible, particularly when we are faced with extreme and unusual circumstances or find ourselves under considerable social pressure from our immediate social circle, which has motivated us to establish a collective capacity to evaluate risks, inform ourselves about them and manage them. Important parts of the modern machinery of government are dedicated to anticipating and managing risk; ready to swing into action when the balloon goes up and demonstrate foresight at other times (Strategy Unit, 2002). Governments exist, at least in part, so that risks can be discussed and negotiated and managed within a political process that makes it possible to question and, if needs be, constrain the actions and responses of individuals and groups who are exposed to risk as well as those who, either accidentally or deliberately, expose others to risk. The idea that we are prone to make mistakes about risk and that we often do not know enough to make good decisions about how to respond to risks is not so difficult to accept or so uncomfortable for the citizens of a liberal democracy, if we also believe that the arrangements for evaluating risks, sharing information about them and managing them are likely to be well conducted by our elected representatives, public officials and by various communities of experts. Of course that faith is itself subject to maintenance of the belief that those representatives and, most especially, the officials and experts upon whom they and we rely, are capable of identifying and putting the general interest first. However, confidence in experts, officials and political representatives to assess and manage risks in our best interests is itself subject to social cascades, in which belief in both the integrity and capacity of public-policy makers and those who inform them can rapidly evaporate. That is, as will become clearer in this book, a common feature of the food-related crises and scandals with which 

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Introduction this book is principally concerned. After all, public-policy makers share the same psychological apparatus as the rest of us and while they may have access to better information than the public at large they are very often required to make major decisions – that must be assumed to have very serious consequences for others – with imperfect information and very little time for reflection; precisely the characteristics of pressured decision-making that most of us associate with making poor personal decisions about exposure to risk and the management of risk. Problems with processing risk-related information The complexity of a good deal of the information underpinning judgements about risk and the difficulties of interpreting that information accurately and consistently have been highlighted by David Ropeik and George Gray of the Harvard School of Public Health in their book Risk. They describe their mission as making risk assessment easier for non-statisticians and non-specialists to understand. They also set out to empower their readers so that they are better able to form their own opinions and practice the assessment and management of risk for themselves (2002: 1–3). Their ‘indispensable guide to risk’ invites us to pose what I see as a key political question about food-related (and other shared) risks in the modern world: how much confidence should we place in our own abilities to become better informed and more measured participants in the public discourse about risks? How deep does faith in our ability to think for ourselves go, in what Ulrich Beck (1992) has labelled (reflecting what he sees as the pre-eminent characteristic of modernity) the Risk Society? Not far beyond these questions comes another related and equally political question: how much of a risk will those who are assigned leading roles in assessing and managing food safety issues be taking if they try harder (something the case studies featured in this book make it clear they have frequently failed to do) to overcome the reluctance of many in government to share all that they know, as soon as they know it, about food-related threats to our health and well-being? Ropeik and Gray observe that ‘at its simplest, risk is the idea that something might happen, usually something bad’ (2002: 5). The resources that are available to us to judge risks and make judgements about what we should and should not do in response to them are both emotional and intellectual. We cannot and should not expect to live in a risky world without engaging both our emotions and our intellect. The one, which enables us to feel fear and anger and to empathise, is of little use without the other, which enables us to behave instrumentally and think strategically. In seeking a balance between our 

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Food, risk and politics anxieties about, and our intellectual apprehension of risk we need to explore our abilities to measure and assess what particular risks mean in terms of our chances of survival and our safety, and understand and identify the strengths and weaknesses in what others have to tell us. There are a variety of measures and techniques for assessing risk which, when taken in isolation, are unlikely to assist us in controlling our emotions or thinking clearly. For example, taken in isolation, knowing the probability that something bad will happen is unlikely to be either particularly helpful or reassuring information. We need information about timescale and severity: that is the impact in terms of the issues that matter most to us as well as the time period to which any information about probability relates. Collecting such information and making sense of it is itself a time-consuming business and, as individuals, we are unlikely to be able to find the time or command the resources and skills that are needed to obtain and assess the data required to make informed judgements about the risks of life, including food-related risks. Given what is now known about such things as individual differences in sensitivity to allergens, the toxicity of pesticides, the nutritional characteristics of different foods, the storage characteristics of different foods and the changes that can occur to different foods in the process of preparing them to eat, it is hardly surprising that we find a division of labour in exploring risks and communicating about them, both sensible and attractive. Hazards in foods come in many different forms. Without the aid of specialist researchers and increasingly expensive scientific equipment, including a bewildering array of microscopes and spectrometers, the identification of hazardous agents in food is likely to prove impossible or impossibly difficult. The ways in which we come into contact with hazards in food are themselves likely to be the subject of scientific detection which few of us have the knowledge or opportunity to undertake. And, in making judgements about the consequences or severity of the damage that is likely to be done when we encounter a hazard, we are unlikely to be successful in pinning hazards down unless we support and draw upon a common enterprise and a sophisticated division of scientific and technical labour. In a society that is aware of risks (whether it merits the appellation Risk Society or not) and has the expertise required to pin risks down, teams of knowledge workers including toxicologists, epidemiologists and statisticians are expected to collaborate and communicate not only with each other but also with the public and its representatives. Experts have developed their own specialist language and most strive hard to find ways of communicating their complex ideas and findings so that others, outside their own expert community, can understand. The toxicologist relies on the notion of a maximum tolerated dose (MTD) or maximum tolerable daily intake (MDI/TDI), because quantity and length of exposure both need to be 10

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Introduction taken into account in order to inform judgements about human safety. What will kill a mouse in no time may take a lifetime to kill a human. The epidemiologist needs to make endless comparisons between populations that can be confidently distinguished in terms of some risk factor or combination of risk factors. The use and presentation of the results of controlled trials has become central to the epidemiologist’s ability to inform and, where necessary, warn the general public – or at least those who make public policy on its behalf. Of course the work of toxicologists and epidemiologists should carry a health warning, because many of the measurements they are able to make leave room for doubt and are subject to uncertainties, which cannot be eradicated. If the public are to make use of the information that such specialists provide they need to be aware that the expert’s judgement is far from watertight (Illing, 2001: 127–132). In putting risk into perspective – by learning more about relative risks – a better informed public will also need to be capable of keeping the findings and conclusions of its risk experts in perspective. As Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell might have put it, if she were commenting on the state of public safety policy (rather than a handbag lost at a major rail terminus): ‘Having to ask the general public, at a moment of extreme crisis, to think about the relativities of risk is asking a very great deal! You should be warned – it may have very unfortunate consequences. Going even further and asking the general public to keep its head, about the relativities of risk and the uncertainties of the science, upon which judgements about risk are based, may be worse than inadvisable, it may be disastrous!’ Fortunately Lady Bracknell was neither a scientist nor a public-policy maker. Those – and I profess to be amongst them – who believe ardently in the advantages of a deliberative democracy are unlikely to rest their case for greater transparency about food safety upon the efficacy of a single speech or encounter with the general public; especially if it takes place only during a national crisis about a food scare or scandal. Rather they hope that an unceasing, very much better informed and increasingly sophisticated process of two-way risk communication will serve as the foundation of a richer and more authentic public dialogue. The need for an informed and reasoned public dialogue, and the forms that it might take, are central issues, implicitly and explicitly under consideration throughout this book. In search of a/the bigger picture When it comes to food the competition for the public’s interest and attention has been growing steadily and the number of food-related topics vying to 11

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Food, risk and politics a­ ttract the public interest has also grown, reflecting the complexity of the international food economy and food production systems. Food markets are global and food is very big business; it is hard to disagree with the proposition that food safety is but one aspect, arguably a relatively minor aspect, of an empire of food-related issues that call for our attention. Nevertheless, it can reasonably be argued that an important part of any balanced and properly informed debate about food is an appreciation of the risks and dangers that transcend individual food scares. Risks of many different kinds pervade the global food economy and the multitude of food cultures with which it interacts. Although this book is primarily about the politics of food safety – and explores in some detail half a dozen episodes that have called food safety in Europe into question – a focus on particular food safety scares and the public anxiety they have given rise to may be viewed as distracting attention from more momentous questions about food. What they consider to be an undue emphasis on a subset of food safety issues has motivated Tim Lang and Michael Heasman to express their frustration with ‘key figures in food policy [who] appear … to be skirting around major problems rather than facing them, or too often dealing with [food policy] challenges’, food safety among them, ‘separately in neat policy boxes rather than holistically’ (2004: 5, 40–41). Lang and Heasman describe in Food Wars, the title of their account of a global struggle over the future of food, a multi-faceted ‘global battle for mouths, minds and markets’. Public anxiety about the safety and quality of food is a part, but only a part, of the territory over which a battle takes place between those whom they identify as representatives of three food paradigms. These paradigms embrace fundamentally different conceptions of agriculture, food science and retailing, and consumer culture. Representatives for each of these paradigms, which pit the most ecologically aware against those whose interests are most unambiguously commercial, regularly come to metaphorical and occasionally real blows (Lang and Heasman, 2004: 263; Freidberg, 2004: 26, 166). There can be little doubt where Lang and Heasman’s sympathies lie; they lie with those they describe as promoting the ‘ecologically integrated paradigm’ rather than the ‘life sciences integrated paradigm’, which they represent as refashioning and elaborating an earlier paradigm that regarded the maximisation of agricultural outputs as paramount. The bigger picture Lang and Heasman set out to present – with its raging battle – for the soul of the global food economy – should not (and will not) pass without comment in this book, although this book has a narrower focus on the politics of food safety. Nevertheless, the global food economy is an important part of the context for the discussion of food, risk and politics. For example, the 12

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Introduction social as well as the political and economic ramifications of BSE and the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in Britain went well beyond Britain, and in Britain went well beyond agricultural producers and food retailers. It is the interconnectedness of food safety and food safety policy with almost every aspect of our social existence, not just politics and economics, which makes it essential to place food scares and scandals in the widest possible context. Just as the academic study of the relationship between risk perception and hazards, introduced briefly above, has confirmed that our awareness of hazards is often unbalanced and sometimes profoundly mistaken, the study of the contemporary international food economy has supplied grounds for believing that our comprehension of any subset of food issues, including food safety issues, may be incomplete and therefore unbalanced, if we fail to appreciate the existence of a bigger picture. Lang and Heasman have a point, especially if, by concentrating intently upon just one part of the wood, we fail to see the relationship between the wood and the trees. But there is another view about how to build understanding. It may well be the case that a good grasp of issues that are closest to hand and of particular interest serves as an excellent, perhaps the very best, departure point for an intelligent and determined enquirer; a departure point that helps to make the more ambitious and demanding journey required to comprehend the bigger picture appear both attractive and more worthwhile. Particular concerns about food safety and food-related risks stand in such a relationship to the greater food system and economy. Food safety issues are a highly significant part of the international food economy and are themselves a subject for intense political conflicts. While some governments have sought to use the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to override measures that they allege unfairly and unreasonably restrain the international trade in foodstuffs (notably those containing genetically modified material), other governments have become engaged in attempts to promote or at least sustain regulations and food policies that constrain markets for genetically modified (GM) foods. There are a range of motives and audiences for such policies, both domestically and at the WTO. Indeed, some EU member states, Britain amongst them, may have been rather unwillingly conscripted into an international trade battle over GM. Food is very much part of international politics – and sometimes surprisingly so. If Abigail Woods (2004a and b), whose impressive study of foot-andmouth disease (FMD) and British agricultural policy is discussed later in this book, is correct, FMD policy in Britain has been profoundly shaped by a very British sense of superiority over other nations on the agricultural front. Britain, she argues, has had what can only be described as a domestic and a foreign food and food safety policy rolled into one; its approach to controlling FMD can be traced back over 100 years. 13

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Food, risk and politics On another agricultural front – for a while it was quite literally the Belgian front – the discovery and analysis of chemicals, such as the dioxins widely advertised as being profoundly injurious to human health, attracted considerable public attention. The fact that dioxins have been shown to be present in food products that make it all the way to market has undoubtedly helped to stimulate interest in the complex networks and relationships that shape food policy, and affect what goes on between regulators, commercial interests and science at all levels (including the international levels) so far as food safety and the governance of food safety is concerned. Open one door in any investigation of food safety, public policy making and the science that is relevant to food safety, and you are likely to find many other doors through which it is possible to pass. Food safety issues cross international boundaries and so do the networks and the interests that seek to influence how they are dealt with and managed. Lang and Heasman themselves acknowledge that the reasons for food safety issues ‘remain[ing] uppermost within food and public health policy’ have a great deal to do with ‘consumer campaigns about risks and … heightened media awareness of poor food processing standards’ (2004: 85). Their list of safety concerns, which cross international frontiers, while far from exhaustive, helps to confirm and illustrate how often food safety issues fuel public and therefore political interest and involvement in food policy. Their list embraces: • International fear and anxiety about the possible spread of BSE • Public concern about environmental toxins, including the heavy metal mercury, entering the food chain • Concern about the use of antibiotics in agriculture, in order to keep animals disease free, and its contribution to the problem of antibiotic resistance • Fear of the damage that pesticide residues in fruit may cause to human health • Anger at persistent organic pollutants (POPs), such as dioxins, found in the food we eat, and their accumulation in our bodies • Anxiety about the use of food additives that help to colour or preserve food, which may be damaging to human health • Disquiet about pathogens, such as salmonella and E. coli O157, that are regularly traced to food products exported around the globe. Even though Lang and Heasman acknowledge the role that food safety plays in mobilising public opinion in the world’s most affluent countries, they have very good reasons for complaining that the lens that is ground by the combined force of public interest and popular media coverage of food safety issues, distorts and blurs our images of some of the most important and frequently neglected food-related health problems. It does so by bringing minor scourges into the foreground and keeping what should be regarded as the weightiest 14

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Introduction public health food-related issues in the background. They are able to point to the death toll from vCJD in the UK; which despite the extraordinary media attention it has attracted and the sustained level of public interest it has received accounted for fewer than 163 deaths (by the end of 2007). They compare this with an annual death toll of 300,000 in the USA attributable to obesity and specifically to ‘diet-related ill health’ (Lang and Heasman, 2004: 41). Poor nutrition is implicated, as they go on to point out, in the growing prevalence of diabetes throughout the world, with an anticipated 366 million diabetics in 2030 (representing a 114 per cent increase on the 2000 estimate for the numbers of people with diabetes) (WHO, 2006; Wild, Roglic, Green et al., 2004). And food poverty has, as they also point out, been growing – not declining. It is certainly salutary and essential, if we are to bring the relative importance of different food-related issues into perspective, to be aware that: ‘more people live in poverty today than 20 years ago. About a fifth of the world’s population, 1.3 billion people, live on a daily income of less than US$1; by 2015 the number of people subsisting below this international poverty line [is expected to increase to] 1.9 billion’ (Lang and Heasman, 2004: 89). These are people who struggle to get enough to eat. The numbers and severity of human problems that lie deep within the global food economy should not be lost sight of, but our ability to perceive them depends on being able to bring our most immediate concerns into sharper focus and then into truer perspective. That perspective should enable us to see more clearly and respond more effectively to the multitude of social, economic and political problems that are built into the global food economy and the productionist paradigm – and its life sciences successor – that Lang and Heasman find so troubling. Analytical approaches and intellectual resources The kinds of scientific enquiry that are likely to prove most influential in shaping the future of the international food economy will depend greatly on the balance that is struck and the kind of relationships that develop between government and commerce, not least over the regulation of food production both in terms of safety and agricultural and social sustainability, and the priority that is given to the international assault on poverty and hunger. There are many interesting and exciting contributions to public discussion about how relationships between science, government and commerce, in evolving food policy, might develop in future (Ford, 2000; Lien and Nerlich, 2004; Tudge, 2003). None of them neglect the subject of food-related risks and safety because it is central to public awareness of food issues and powerfully motivates publicpolicy makers to find out more about food production and the myriad linkages 15

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Food, risk and politics between the safety of food and the operation of markets, agricultural systems, the future of human populations in different parts of the world and the global environment. If, as has been persuasively argued, the approach to food policy of governments, corporations and many farmers has been dominated by an obsession with the quantity rather than the quality of food production and by a belief that more almost certainly means better, because it means more to eat and more rapid economic development and profitability, then that approach is rightly being widely questioned (Lang and Heasman, 2004: 96–97; Tudge, 2003: 381–392). The laws of unintended consequences and the frequency of unexpected results are a very important part of the politics of risk and food safety. When we begin to understand one corner of a larger system better we can begin to appreciate how our immediate concerns connect with more distant ones. In the production, distribution and sale of food in the global economy local decisions tend to have regional and even international consequences. What appear to be private and personal – not least our tastes in food and preferences reflected in individual purchasing decisions – turn out to be political. In her remarkable study of the international commerce in beans and the impact of culture on food choices and production, Susanne Freidberg has exposed and illuminated the ways in which food scares, in what she calls an anxious age, have social, economic and political ramifications that extend well beyond the boundaries of a single state (Freidberg, 2004). A focus on food safety should never be allowed to blinker us to broader questions about economic justice, public health and environmental impact. That includes an appreciation of how culturally and commercially determined standards in one jurisdiction can influence life in another, how narrowly drawn (and selfish) concerns over the appearance of food in one domain can adversely affect the production of food and food producers, including entire communities, in another. Indeed, the impact of almost every aspect of what may appear to be purely local food systems on far-away places has begun to impinge on the public consciousness. It is not just that the food economy and the carbon economy are inextricably linked and that attitudes to food consumption are shaped across entire continents by restaurant chains such as McDonalds, it is also the case that what we take to be personal and local preferences and requirements, such as the insistence on particular colours and shapes and what may be presented as food safety requirements, can register powerfully in almost any other part of the world, because of the degree of integration that now exists in the global food economy (Freidberg, 2004: 216–212). The effort to understand the management and perception of risk in relation to the politics of food is necessarily a multi-disciplinary effort. This book draws 16

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Introduction particularly heavily on the ideas and discoveries of social psychologists – most notably Paul Slovic (1998; 2000; 2003; see also Jaeger, Renn, Rasa et al., 2001: 101–108) – and will focus on the interrelationships between risk perception, media coverage of hazards and media influence upon public perception of those hazards. The psychometric paradigm (and the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF)) is only one of an impressive array of intellectual resources that are available to scholars who want to interrogate the politics of risk and food safety. Slovic has played a leading role in challenging key aspects of what Carlo Jaeger and his colleagues (2001) have called the Rational Actor Paradigm (RAP), by demonstrating the extent to which emotional responses – based on what Slovic and his colleagues have labelled the affect heuristic (Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic et al., 2000) – influences our behaviour and perceptions of hazards (and much else besides). The affect heuristic is a major challenge to a narrowly drawn and increasingly dubious analytical framework that erects a vast edifice upon the notion of a strictly rational and instrumental psychology; the psychology of ‘economic man’ (the profit-maximising and cost-minimising creature so beloved of neo-classical economic theory). If emotional and intellectual responses to risk can sharply diverge – and psychologists such as Slovic provide plenty of evidence that they can – we enter a world in which the risk of overreaction is not confined to the general public. In some cases it is public-policy makers, as is argued later in this book, who are prone to overreaction in the face of a novel risk, especially when there is popular alarm. Cooler heads are needed, especially amongst public-policy makers, who are able to promote a deliberative approach to hazards and win popular support for making considered judgements about how unanticipated risks can best be debated and managed. Even in its simplest and crudest form such models of societal responses to risk in liberal and democratic societies imply problematic and often fraught interactions between those who govern and those who are served by government. It is unlikely that the dynamics of risk politics in liberal democracies, with their independent press, radio and television channels, will be predictable or easy to understand. As public servants, officials and elected representatives look for public support, approval and understanding they may be fearful – quite understandably – of the consequences of appearing to neglect or disregard public opinion. Listening to the public is, after all, an important and essential part of the political behaviour we expect of those who govern in a liberal democracy. However, their judgements about how far they will be trusted by the public and how well any decisions they make about disclosing information and managing risks will be received cannot but entail a kind of guesswork that, even in the age of the focus group, is much more akin to gambling and crystal ball gazing than it is to formal statistically based risk analysis. What is more, public opinion and 17

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Food, risk and politics reaction is but one factor that risk managers are expected to take into account in deciding how to handle a new or existing hazard that has recently been drawn to public attention. Lawyers, public health advisers, economists, statisticians and toxicologists will almost certainly join the public relations advisers in a queue outside the door of risk managers. All can be expected to press their case and the claims of the perspective they represent upon risk managers. Those expecting the management of risk in liberal democracies to become increasingly fraught and complicated are unlikely to be disappointed unless the public, the experts and the policy makers understand each other better, find ways of working more closely together, and grow considerably in maturity. Risk, food and politics: a multi-disciplinary enterprise The disciplines and approaches that students of risk politics can draw upon should be more openly acknowledged if their actual and potential contribution to creating a more mature dialogue is to be borne in mind and displayed when occasion arises. And occasion is likely to arise quite frequently. Take, for example, the insights and perspective of specialist lawyers (Holland and Pope, 2004; Lauterburg, 2001). Because risk politics is intimately connected with rules and conventions governing the international trade in agricultural products, lawyers are rarely far removed from questions of food safety. Some very important parts of food law are part of international law, law that is subject to constant amendment and development in the light of work undertaken by a myriad of international organisations. Those organisations have been evolving a global framework to govern the production and distribution of food. The WTO, established in 1995, followed on from the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) which was formulated a decade earlier and itself rested upon a system for strengthening and developing the international trading system founded in 1947. The implications of the WTO and its voluminous rule-books, applying to trade in foodstuffs between 150 member states, are profound. But WTO rulebooks have become desperately complicated, and the expertise needed to interpret and apply them has itself become a very expensive commodity. Even though the WTO is built upon statements of principle that are intended to undergird a worldwide free trade system, those principles have been unevenly and partially applied, most notably to the trade in agricultural products. Anti-competitive behaviour, much of it in the form of food policies (perhaps masquerading as food safety policies), are frequently represented as obstacles to the development of the international trading system, on the one hand, and reasonable, even essential 18

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Introduction devices, for protecting the interests of consumers, on the other. The WTO, including its Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), is just one part of the international institutional architecture that is relevant to food safety. Amongst the international bodies which merit specialist study (and not only by lawyers and international relations experts) are to be found the United Nations’ FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) and the WHO (World Health Organization) in support of the work of the CAC (Codex Alimentarius Commission). The CAC describes its work as: ‘developing food standards, guidelines and related texts [to help protect the] health of consumers and ensure fair trade practices in the food trade, and promote coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international and non-governmental organizations’ (CAC, 2008). In recent years, and in the wake of food scandals in Europe, there has been a comprehensive re-writing of European Food Law and radical reform of scientific advice leading to the creation of a European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which is itself dependent on expert advice from lawyers in addition to the technical opinions supplied by its scientific assessors and analysts. The perspective of economists is no less important than that of lawyers. Food safety comes at a price and lack of safety or poor safety also has costs, even if we are often uncertain of precisely how great they are. Decisions and judgements about food safety that are misinformed also have economic consequences that may be overlooked, or under- or overestimated; a considerable risk, in the absence of a substantial input from those who are able to quantify economic losses and benefits and explain them to others, including policy makers (Stern and Fineberg, 1996; Sunstein, 2002). Opportunity costs are always an issue, whether explicitly recognised as such by public officials, food producers and distributors, or members of the public. Stern and Fineberg give the example of costs arising from the accidental release of a carcinogen in Brazil in 1987. Its relevance to considering cases of food contamination isn’t hard to understand. According to Stern and Fineberg, two men came upon what they thought was scrap metal, from which it would be possible for them to make money. They ended up exposing family and neighbours to radioactive caesium. The immediate consequences included ‘4 deaths and 50 cases of radioactive contamination that required medical treatment’ (1996: 45). Should the estimation of costs have been limited to the damage done to neighbours and family the picture would have been disturbing enough. But the analysis of costs needed to be, and was, taken much further. The estimate of clean-up costs ran to $20 million and the unplanned release of radioactive contamination led to a ‘50% drop in the wholesale value of agricultural products from the Brazilian state in which the accident occurred’ (45). It is often hard to know how far it is sensible or useful to track the knock 19

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Food, risk and politics -on effects of a food safety scare and how wide to cast the net. But costs arising from proven instances of food contamination and suspicions, which may prove groundless, can be substantial and are often felt at some considerable distance from those who were involved in an alleged incident of contamination. If, as Stern and Fineberg and their colleagues argue, we are to make informed choices that take into account a full range of the consequences of events in which food safety is called into question or actually compromised, we need methods of analysis which enable us to understand not only the psychological consequences but also the economic impact of such events. One of the most articulate and effective spokesmen for this point of view is Cass Sunstein, whose Risk and Reason (2002) presents a powerful and persuasive case for utilising economic analyses to improve our grasp of the relative scale of costs and benefits that flow from different strategies in identifying and managing environmental risks. Sunstein is certain that ‘people, including government officials, often lack riskrelated information’ and that much of the information that is needed to make reasoned judgments about managing risks intelligently, entails the quantification and comparison of costs and benefits associated with different courses of action (2002: 33–36). He is also clear that public-policy makers need the tools, including the tools of economic analysis, to help them formulate appropriate and effective policies to encourage those whose behaviour seems most likely to expose others to risk, to consider and incorporate other people’s costs and benefits into their decisions about what to do and how to behave (Sunstein, 2002: 269). The sociology of risk has been a particularly dynamic and controversial field of enquiry (see for example: Giddens, 2002; Löfstedt and Frewer, 1998; Seligman, 2000). The work of sociologists and anthropologists has in many ways set the pace for those enquiring into risk perception and many aspects of the politics of risk. How necessary, for instance, is it to be aware of particular cultural and social contexts when seeking to make sense of public reactions to specific risks and the political priority that they are given? The anthropologist Mary Douglas (1992) on her own and in partnership with her collaborator, the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky (1982), investigated both the extent to which beliefs about danger are culturally conditioned and the impact of political and cultural bias upon such things as the management of risk and the allocation of responsibility for particular hazards. In a lecture on environments at risk given in 1970, when her thoughts on the subject of risk were being formed, Douglas suggested that there were important commonalities as well as obvious differences in the ways that human beings perceived and responded to risk. Finding ways to fit dangers – new and old – into our established view of the world and the social order of which we are a part helps us to manage in risky environments. While, Douglas suggested, particular risks were constantly coming and ­going, 20

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Introduction human culture was much more persistent. Human beings, she argued, have a repertoire of responses to danger, including new dangers; responses that draw upon existing cultural forms. Handling risk socially and psychologically is very demanding, even exhausting, and we are powerfully motivated to resist any attempt to set us adrift from cultural anchors that help us to make sense of our world. Understanding culture is therefore a key to understanding the human perception of and response to risk. The relevance to issues of food safety seems clear. If we are culturally predisposed to trust some people and institutions and some ways of accounting for the dangers we face, we will tend to prefer those sources of information and explanation. If we are culturally predisposed to be distrustful and suspicious of others then their explanations of what is and is not dangerous will gain purchase with much greater difficulty and will be much less likely, ultimately, to win our acceptance. Culturally determined ideas about our relationship to the environment, about what is right and wrong, what is reasonable and unreasonable, play a major role in determining how we react to information about threats to our well-being. Mary Douglas has explained that: ‘telling each other that there is no time, that we can’t afford it, that God wouldn’t like it, and that it is against nature, [that] our children will suffer … are [all examples of ] the means by which we adapt our society to our environment, and it to ourselves’ (1999: 213). If there is a kind of social grain to popular risk perception then risk managers may be well advised to work with it rather than against it. Whether, assuming such a social grain exists, it is subject to substantial change over time and in the course of events has become one of the principal questions – and fault lines – engaging those whose disciplinary approach to risk draws primarily on sociological and anthropological thought. Is there, when it comes to understanding and coping with danger, a blame game that pervades all human cultures? To what extent, if at all, can a rational discourse about risks overcome cultural predispositions to judge information about particular risks by the source as opposed to its scientific or statistical content? The anthropological and sociological approaches that have developed out of Douglas’s work have tended to treat the view that human responses to risk are essentially irrational, as unexceptional and reasonable. But this may pose a substantial problem for those who believe that the insights gained from sociological enquiry and the other social science disciplines should not only help us to interpret the world but play a vital role in enabling us to manage our risky world more successfully. The point, as one political philosopher put it, is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. The persistence of certain cultural forms, which insist upon having someone or something to blame, may prove more of an obstacle than an aid; especially if we want to develop the means to change public policy, most especially if we wish to bring change 21

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Food, risk and politics about ­ democratically. One possibility, which some find highly disturbing, is that we live at a time when everyone and, in a sense, no one, is to blame for the risks that most threaten human existence. It is that possibility which has been trumpeted by one brand of contemporary sociological theory. If we come to blame ourselves rather than some particular section of society or external agent – for the most serious hazards and dangers we face – might not the difficulties of managing risk appear insuperable? Without accepting the proposition that we have irrecoverably lost control of our environment and seeded it with risks that will, whatever we do from now on, overwhelm human society, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck has developed the view that the risks we now face and our responses to them cannot be regarded as simply a continuation or even a radical refashioning of existing cultural forms. The world has changed almost beyond belief. Risk has become the dominant consideration in all our lives. What is more, we have become increasingly aware that we are or may be the (often unwitting) authors of the greatest risks that we face. What Beck has described as reflexive risk modernity is presented as the key to understanding the Risk Society in which we now live. This is yet another and even more encompassing picture of risk than the big pictures referred to earlier in this chapter. It is a view that can only be truly apprehended by human beings who understand how human activity imperils the world and appreciate the potency of a modernity that changes/rewrites the terms/rules of human existence. Such knowledge should surely lead us to try and refashion the way we live together, so that we are able to deal with a world of risk that is qualitatively different from any previous time. The realisation that humanity has become a great threat to life on Earth and to its own life on Earth should, if Beck’s sociological perspective on risk is accepted, provide us with a compelling justification for transforming human society and, most especially, our political institutions. In much of Beck’s work it is extant and presumed future threats, including threats to what we eat, that help to dramatise and convey notion of the Risk Society (1998: 9–13). Such flights of the sociological imagination contrast sharply with the work of statisticians and their kith and kin, epidemiologists, toxicologists and others, including microbiologists and veterinarians, who offer us insights into the risks associated with the food we eat. All these experts rely on careful observation and the steady collection, comparison and analysis of quantitative data. Some of them see, in work such as Beck’s, a retreat from reason and a rejection or hostility to science (Gillott and Kumar, 1997). Here we have yet another big picture, but it is our loss of faith in the tools that are said to have contributed most to helping us understand and manage our world more productively and successfully that is represented as the greatest threat to the future of humanity. Our best prospects for understanding and therefore managing risks success22

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Introduction fully depend on making the very best use possible of the tools scientific enquiry provides us with. Refusing to panic and relying on the painstaking work of those who understand the calculation of probabilities is – so the argument goes – a far better course than tagging on behind a sociological Pied Piper, such as Ulrich Beck. There will always be uncertainty – scientists do not deny that – but statistics and the scientific method make uncertainty far more tractable and far less frightening than otherwise would be the case (Gigerenzer, 2002: 229–246). Impressive tomes, such as the Food Safety Handbook, collect together and present the products of scientific research into food and food-related hazards and the surveillance systems that have been established to provide us with early warnings of avoidable and ameliorable dangers (Schmidt and Rodrick, 2003). But they stand as part of an increasingly complex academic enterprise attempting to make sense of risk and communicate riskiness and what we are and are not able to do individually and collectively in response to it. It is also worth bearing in mind that not only can the products of science and statistical analysis be intimidating and difficult to understand, they cannot banish disagreement. That includes disagreements between experts about the significance or the extent of particular risks and sharp differences of view about how risks should be managed. Science is vitally important but it does not speak for itself. Scientific truths from one quarter may be outflanked by evidence and argument from another in a world that is full of competing sources of information, rival interests and rival risk communicators. Each may question the integrity and the choices of other experts and put forward their own, perhaps more agreeable, interpretations of the scientific evidence (Belton and Belton, 2003: 3–8). When it comes to food safety, politics is never far away. Nevertheless, the battle for public trust often relies on scientific judgements, on what is presented as the best and most independent science. The enormous investment (in the EU and its member states), since the mid-1990s, in scientific assessments of foodrelated risks and the communication of risk, attests to that (Randall, 2001). This is not to suggest, for a moment, that scientific risk assessment should be disregarded or subsumed under either economic or sociological frames of reference. Rather it is advanced to support the proposition that there is no single science of risk that can banish uncertainties and differences about food-related risks or how to manage them. It also underlines the point that battle-lines, for our attention, our understanding and our trust, can easily and quickly be drawn. This book has been written with such battle-lines very much in mind. Content and structure This book relies upon the use of case studies. The case studies are used to pose 23

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Food, risk and politics and pursue questions about the politics of risk, public perception of risk and the management of food-related risks as well as to exploit the richness of individual risk stories as a means of approaching the politics of risk. The book also relies heavily on a tradition of enquiry, in the political and social sciences, that utilises a variety of sources – official, popular and academic – to illuminate political judgements and actions in the belief that, in the process of distilling and examining multiple viewpoints alongside official records, it is possible to make better sense of the politics of risk than would be possible by relying on official accounts of food crises and scandals on their own. There is little problem in finding different accounts – official, popular and academic – of the events that are at the heart of this book. Each of the case studies deals with events and issues that have aroused strong public feelings. Most continue to stimulate public interest and, on occasion, a strong sense of public indignation. All of them have had a significant public impact as well an impact on the careers of individual politicians, political parties and public policy. What Richard North and the former Conservative MP Teresa Gorman referred to as Chickengate (1990) checked the political career of a Conservative political star, Edwina Currie; most would now agree unfairly. The contamination of animal feed with dioxin in Belgium in 1999 is credited with having destroyed the reelection prospects of a successful Belgian government (Doeg, 2005: 193–197). It has been argued that the electorate’s judgement was unhinged by the dioxin scare (Lok and Powell, 2000). The BSE crisis, a somewhat misleading word to use about a decade and more of public and political anxiety about a disease in cattle first recognised by veterinary experts in the 1980s, is said to have contributed to the demise of Conservative government in Britain and to have provided one of the strongest justifications for a new constitutional settlement in Britain favouring more open government (Hughes, 1998). The subsequent Phillips Inquiry examined the political and policy-making entrails of the BSE scandal in minute detail but seemed reluctant to attribute blame for what had and had not happened. The acceptability and safety of genetically modified crops was widely regarded as one of the greatest tests of the openness and democratic credentials of the Blair Government; a government that appeared to have found itself on the horns of a dilemma over the relative weight that it should give to public anxieties about food safety and to its commitment to encouraging investment in the future of British biotechnology (Budge, Crewe, McKay et al., 2004: 580–581). When, on the eve of a British general election in 2001 Britain began to experience an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), the election was postponed and the Prime Minister’s political virility, in responding to a national crisis, became the central issue in the reporting of the FMD outbreak. The Prime Minister’s office was presented as the central clearing house for its 24

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Introduction management (Taylor, 2003: 542). Years earlier Hugh Pennington, who was invited by the Scottish authorities to investigate an outbreak of E. coli O157 in Scotland, an outbreak explored in Chapter 3, had been so impressed by the importance in food crises of the interaction between politics and media that he wrote: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that the media play a central – often defining – role in risk communication’ (Bennett and Calman, 1999: 81). Indeed, the impact of the media on our collective ability to keep things in perspective is a major issue in the chapters that follow and in the concluding discussion. Pennington was, as his account of the E. coli outbreaks makes clear, acutely aware that experts are drawn into food safety crises for more than their expertise; they can and do serve as lightning rods for officialdom in troubled times (Pennington, 2003: 15). The changeable nature of public opinion, both during and in the wake of food scares and scandals, is of great interest to media and politicians. It is surely the case – particularly in liberal democracies – that those who seek to manage food crises need to pay as much attention to the formation and impact of shifts of public opinion as they do the food safety hazards and events themselves. For one thing is clear: food safety is rarely out of the headlines. Case studies In each of the chapters that follow, the reader will be invited to consider a number of general themes, as well as the particular characteristics of a select set of food safety issues and events. Each chapter will begin by providing some of the essential specialist and scientific information that is required as background, to inform the discussion of the events and issues that are under consideration. In some cases there is little dispute about what is known scientifically or its significance for human health. In other cases, most notably GM food and the transmission of BSE, the science underlying both the formulation and application of food safety policy is hotly disputed and/or uncertain. Each chapter also tells a story and offers an account of what is thought to have happened in the course of a particular food scandal or issue coming to public attention and becoming the focus of political debate and argument. Given the frequency with which the political waters of food scares and scandals and food safety issues are muddied by rival claims about what is and is not at risk and what should and should not have been done, a significant amount of attention will be devoted to the discussion of government action and ­inaction. The opportunities this provides to make comparisons will be especially important. One of the principal advantages of presenting a series of case studies together is that it offers an opportunity to compare and contrast what is 25

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Food, risk and politics known about particular cases as a means of identifying and reporting common f­eatures. The use of case studies for purposes of comparison and in order to help develop a general perspective is an important part of this volume (George and Bennett, 2005; Hall, Land, Parker et al., 1975). The first of the case studies to be presented in this book concerns a national alarm in the UK, said to be have been provoked by the careless talk of a junior health minister in Margaret Thatcher’s last administration. The minister concerned, a colourful Conservative politician, Edwina Currie, vehemently denied that she had acted irresponsibly by drawing the public’s attention to health risks associated with the presence of salmonella in eggs. Her claims that salmonella in eggs posed a serious health threat produced more heat than light in Whitehall, Parliament and the press; but it was a story that the press proved reluctant, until the minister’s departure, to let go. It has been described, in a somewhat unfortunate but perhaps apposite phrase, as a classic example of a media ‘feeding frenzy’. A number of Edwina Currie’s parliamentary colleagues took the view that she had been unwise in her public statements; or, to put it another way, that she had been too honest! She can certainly claim to have been turned into a sacrificial lamb. A lamb that went for slaughter in order to uphold (unsuccessfully, if the account that follows below is correct) the verities of British food and agricultural policy, which had had rather more regard for the interests of producers than for those of consumers. Whitehall’s assumptions about the weight that should be given to producer interests were already under severe strain and Currie’s departure from government appeared, in retrospect, to speak rather more of communications failures across government than of individual ministerial failure. The political turbulence caused by Currie’s warnings about salmonella in eggs signalled a deep disturbance in food policy and interactions between media, politics and public opinion that were to become increasingly difficult to manage. That will be the principal theme of Chapter 2, which deals with the salmonella in eggs scare. If salmonella in eggs turned out to be the occasion for a political sacrifice then the second case study, in Chapter 3, dealing with the first of a series of E. coli O157 outbreaks in Scotland (which occurred in 1996), turned into an opportunity to admire the detective skills of a professor of bacteriology. His determination and independence rightly attracted public praise. Relationships between public officials, elected politicians and the experts on whom they call have become a very important part of almost all the food safety scares and scandals that feature in this book. The freedom with which experts feel able to ­operate, in the service of government and the public, and in any given political environment, is something that Hugh Pennington and others have reflected upon. It is also a central theme discussed in the case studies that follow. Pennington wrote 26

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Introduction a book entitled When Food Kills (2003) about the E. coli outbreak he was asked to report on. His book was an exploration of what he called disaster science. He set out to compare the public response to a deadly episode of food poisoning with other disasters; his survey covered disasters in transportation, mineral extraction and waste disposal. The selective attention of press and officials, as well as disagreements within scientific communities, will, Pennington suggests, always make it difficult for even the most independent and determined of experts to ensure that what they have to say is acted upon. The third case study, in Chapter 4, concerns a food scandal which has been described as the food scandal to end all food scandals. It was also a political scandal par excellence. It burnt with a slow fuse before it burst on the public scene. It has demonstrated a quite extraordinary political half life, comparable to the half life of the radioactive contamination spread across Europe from the crippled nuclear facilities at Chernobyl. It is, as Patrick van Zwanenberg and Erik Millstone have pointed out, the most extensively documented failure of precautionary public policy in British political history (2005: 5). It is also the signal event in the recent history of food safety policy in Britain and the European Union (EU). The theme of the chapter is the extraordinarily corrosive impact on public opinion and trust in government that allegations about secrecy in the management of safety in general and food safety in particular can have. The charge made against public authorities in Britain and abroad, as more and more information came into the public domain, was that they had put the interests of a minority of the population, its food producers and exporters, before the interests of the population as a whole. The proposition, that a British government acted, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as though it believed the public would be better off if they were deceived and treated as ‘ignorant, stupid, and innumerate’, has become so widely accepted that it merits very close examination (Löfstedt and Horlick-Jones, 1999: 81). It is particularly important to consider the extent to which the traumatic public announcement, made in 1996, that BSE was almost certainly the cause of vCJD, conditioned changes in the behaviour of government risk managers and communicators and the experts from whom they are expected to take advice. If the scares, injuries and deaths attributed to salmonella in eggs, E. coli infection in the glens of Scotland and the transmission of BSE to humans can be said to have focused attention on inadequate food safety policies and systems, the same cannot be said about the introduction of genetically modified (GM) materials into food, the subject of the case study in Chapter 5. If there is a crisis, a crisis of confidence in GM science and its use in agriculture (and few would dispute that a crisis of confidence exists in the Europe Union), it can be viewed as a kind of pre-emptive or anticipatory crisis. Clear evidence that GM food threatens the health of consumers does not exist. Yet European 27

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Food, risk and politics g­ overnments have invested considerable amounts of financial and political capital in responding to public anxieties. They have invested heavily in enhancing the public’s understanding of the science underpinning GM crops. The British government, for example, supported an innovative and extensive consultation scheme designed to inform the public and record its opinions about GM crops. The government hoped the consultation would clear the air and prepare the way for British bio-technology firms to pursue new scientific and commercial opportunities (GM Dialogue, 2002; GM Nation, 2003). However, the Prime Minister enjoyed little success in overturning what he clearly regarded as an ill-informed and obstructive public opinion (Blair, 2002). Does public alarm over GM in European societies suggest that the European public has succumbed to an epidemic of fear? Is there a serious residual problem, which will disappear given time, because of the allegedly catastrophic government failures in managing BSE? Is there a deep and all pervading distrust of science, which has come to a head with GM? Should continuing public anxiety over GM be read as a test case demonstrating the unaccountable and unreasonable power of the mass media to amplify unfounded public fears about interference with nature? Is public alarm over GM confirmation of precisely the kind of risk culture and group psychology pinpointed by Mary Douglas in her investigation of the relationship between risk and culture? Have food crises taken on a kind of virtual character and will public-policy makers have no option but to devote more attention to anticipating new kinds and sources of anxiety about the safety of food? In Chapter 6, the fifth case study concerns the contamination of animal feed with dioxin and other persistent and harmful chemicals that can accumulate in the human body. The strength of the public’s reaction to news that food supplies had been contaminated, the political consequences of that news, the amplification of public anxiety about exposure to contaminated food products within Belgium and around the world (during the Spring and Summer of 1999), and the willingness of governments and international authorities, outside of Belgium and on the basis of quite limited information, to criticise the Belgian authorities, makes the dioxin crisis a particularly instructive and interesting case study. The economic consequences of the dioxin contamination and the estimation of the financial losses that have been directly and indirectly attributed to it make comparisons with other food scares and scandals particularly interesting. Despite all that had gone before, the Belgian authorities appeared to have made very few preparations for handling information about food-borne threats to public health. What are the chances that public authorities will be caught similarly unawares again? Are breaches of food safety so different from one another that the lessons from one case cannot be applied to another? Does 28

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Introduction government, like individuals, tend to assume: ‘it cannot happen here’ (‘it will not happen to me’)? The grounds for seriously questioning the capacity of European governments to learn lessons from individual food crises have been strengthened rather than weakened by the British government’s handling of the foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreak of 2001, the final case study, the subject of Chapter 7. Of all the European Union member states with reason to interrogate and overhaul procedures for dealing with agricultural and food-related crises, the British government might reasonably have been expected to be best equipped and best motivated to take the lead. Almost all of the evidence presented by Abigal Woods, in her A Manufactured Plague (2004a), suggests that the public authorities often display a deep reluctance to engage in root and branch reform of established practices; though they often strive to give the impression of doing the opposite by launching reviews, which is not the same thing at all. Is the FMD crisis the case that proves, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the plea ‘physician health thyself ’ is truly misguided because it is destined to fall on deaf ears? Is it necessary or even essential, in managing risk intelligently, for public authorities to invite, encourage and sustain rival viewpoints and to publish them to the world? That is certainly the view of van Zwanenberg and Millstone (2005), in their path-breaking analysis of the relationship between scientists and public officials in the course of the BSE affair. Theirs is an extraordinary piece of academic work that builds upon a meticulous study of the mountain of documentation supplied to the Phillips Inquiry into BSE. This book will develop the view that openness and toleration – indeed the facilitation and encouragement – of rival viewpoints about the nature and severity of different risks and their management, is a necessary if not a sufficient condition for improving risk assessment, communication and management. However, unless more progress can be made with educating each other about possible blind spots in human risk perception and improving the public management and communication of risk, future alarms and excursions about food safety are likely to prove as unproductive – possibly counterproductive – as they have in the past. In search of perspective It is essential to acknowledge just how paradoxical our attitudes towards food safety can be. Most Europeans live in societies where there is more than enough to eat; societies where there is an abundance of food, judged by any reasonable historical standard, and an unparalleled choice of things to eat. For most of us, eating too much is a greater threat to health than eating food that is 29

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Food, risk and politics c­ ontaminated. Yet we are prone, as the food scandals and crises explored in this book show, to sudden and dramatic losses of confidence in food, those who grow, transport and sell it and those who regulate its supply. Although most of us regard ourselves as media savvy and able to take such things as advertisers’ claims, including claims about food, with a pinch of salt, our food purchases can be powerfully – though often only briefly – influenced by unbalanced and ill-informed media coverage. And, as the case studies clearly demonstrate, media coverage is often unbalanced and unbalancing. We need good information and analysis if we are to think for ourselves and think clearly about food safety issues. And we need to direct our attention beyond the food hazards that claim the greatest amount of media attention if we are to gain perspective about food-related risks and the politics of risk. This book has been written in the belief that good information and analysis can help us all to gain perspective. It has been written, at least in part, in response to some observations and questions posed by a former European commissioner, the commissioner responsible for food safety policy in the European Union from 1999–2004. David Byrne declared, shortly after taking up his post as a European commissioner, that his paramount objective was to restore European consumers’ confidence in food. Speaking for the Commission, he said that ‘consumer confidence [had] been badly affected by the various food alerts and crises of recent years and months’ (Byrne, 2000). He was convinced that public confidence could only be re-established if there was strong and united European action to assert the overriding importance of public safety in food policy. But, as he pointed out, the public’s perception of food-related risks can be as much – if not more – of a problem as the food hazards to which many ordinary Europeans fear they have been exposed. Byrne referred, amongst other things, to the dangers of ‘risk dyslexia’ and ‘risk overload’. This book about food, risk and politics is written in the belief that a proper understanding of food scandals, crises and scares and their political import is only possible if we can develop a balanced appreciation of the ways in which politics, human risk psychology and food safety interact and impact upon one another. It is possible to have reasoned and reasonable public debate about food and food safety but such debate depends on a better understanding of how we communicate, perceive and respond to food-related risks – not just the risks themselves.

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2 Salmonella and media intrusion: food safety policy and politics upset

Background to a great British food scare The career of one British politician, the former Conservative MP Edwina Currie, is more closely associated with food scares in Britain than that of any other. In the closing weeks of 1988 Edwina Currie (then a junior minister at the Department of Health) gave a short interview that was broadcast on national television. Just one sentence from her brief TV interview was decisive in influencing what would become the lead news item across Britain in the days that followed. The minister had made what appeared to be a startling claim: ‘Most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now infected with salmonella’. The claim was nothing like as remarkable as it may have seemed to the British public at the time. The prevalence of salmonella had been the subject of official statements on a number of earlier occasions and the government had already issued advice and guidance about how the public could and should limit the risk of food-borne salmonella infection. However, this time the minister’s comments not only came to dominate the news but had an impact on her own political career that she had not anticipated. Having commented on the prevalence of salmonella on 3 December 1988 Mrs Currie concluded, just over a fortnight later, that even though she had been completely justified in sounding a public alarm, and reinforcing her officials’ concerns about infected egg production, she had no alternative but to resign from the government. She submitted her resignation on the 23 of December in the face of allegations that she, almost single-handedly and quite needlessly, had triggered a public panic and come close to destroying the British egg industry (Currie, 2002: 92–98). Currie’s ministerial career ended amidst acrimonious exchanges in Whitehall and Westminster and her departure was marked by sharply deteriorating relations between the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) and the Department of Health (DoH). Food policy and food safety in particular, which 31

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Food, risk and politics had been a matter primarily for MAFF and local food inspectors, seemed to have become almost everybody’s business. The dual role of the agriculture department, responsible for many aspects of food safety as well as food production, as the department of state that had ruled the food policy roost in the UK for over forty years, was widely called into question. Despite this and the intensity of the public interest in food poisoning attributable to infected eggs a clear institutional separation between what MAFF had regarded as its wide-ranging and integrated responsibility for food production and food safety policy, wasn’t formally instituted until the establishment of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) more than a decade later (in the wake of the James report). This was not the first or last occasion upon which fallout from a food scare had a dramatic and more or less immediate impact on politics and policy; however, others burned more slowly, until they attracted the attention and ignited the close interest of opposition parties, media pundits and finally the general public. What had all the fuss over salmonella really been about? Was it just a question of punishing a junior minister who had made an incautious remark, by ending her political career in order to appease the interests of British egg producers and satisfy the appetite of the British press for a guilty party? Why didn’t the unmistakable evidence of public alarm about the safety of egg production lead more directly to institutional change in the allocation of responsibility for food safety? Did the salmonella scare of 1988/1989 have any deeper political significance or was it just an example of a media feeding frenzy and yet more evidence of the capriciousness of the political system and the vagaries of public life? The academic Martin Smith features high on the list of those who concluded that the salmonella affair had a deeper significance and that it was a public manifestation of a critical realignment of interests and forces affecting food policy as well as a growing public interest in a wide range of food issues (1991). In Smith’s view, one that will be explored in some detail, ‘the salmonella affair revealed the extent to which what had once been a consensual food policy community [had] become divided and conflictual and much more open to new interests’ (Smith, 1991: 253). What is beyond dispute is that the salmonella affair confirmed what many politicians and reporters had always believed: while many stories are capable of provoking great public anxiety, a few, often for reasons that are hard to fathom at the time, take on a life of their own, feed back upon themselves and fuel popular concern that is extraordinarily difficult to manage. The salmonella affair also seems to confirm something else of importance in the politics of risk and food: the level of public interest generated by a scare and scandal is very often a poor guide to the real significance of the events being reported (Allan, 2002: 146–176; Cohl, 1997: 12–18; Payne, 1998: 131–137; Singer and Endreny, 1993: 21–23). 32

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Salmonella and media intrusion Whatever the rights or wrongs of Edwina Currie’s allegations about the prevalence of salmonella in eggs, the public reaction to her announcement was extraordinarily rapid and simply incapable of being ignored by those at the head of the British government. The implications for poultry producers were equally clear – livelihoods were lost. One account of the public reaction to the claim that the whole of the country’s egg production was infected with salmonella recorded that: ‘within days’ of Mrs Currie’s statement there had been ‘an unparalleled 50% slump in egg sales’. The same analysts, of the ‘egg scare’, went on to note that ‘hospital and school sales [of eggs] fell by 90% [and] newspapers report[ed] a mountain of 300 million unsold eggs’ (North and Gorman, 1990: 1–2). The minister had been, as they pointed out, very widely reported, very widely believed and public behaviour had been very dramatically altered. Behaviour had changed so quickly and substantially that the economics of poultry and egg production in Britain had been transformed in the space of just a few days. Richard North argued, some years later, in a book lamenting the death of British agriculture, that ‘two years after the start of the crisis, the egg industry had sharply contracted, [contracting] from over 34,000 holdings and 31 million birds to 28,227 and 28 million birds in 1990’ (North, 2001: 91–92). Never a friend of British (or European) public-policy makers North went on to conclude that small producers, including many free-range poultry keepers, had their businesses ruined and some ‘4000 people had stopped keeping hens altogether’. Nevertheless the minister, Edwina Currie, had given what she believed to be an honest answer to a question of genuine public interest: how widespread was salmonella in British egg production? Her answer had been based on information that had come from scientific experts and official advisers. That information confirmed earlier suggestions that salmonella infection was ubiquitous in hens and British egg production (House of Commons, 1988/89: 99). In her autobiography, based on the diary she kept throughout the period when she found herself becoming the government’s most controversial minister, Mrs Currie explained: ‘I had been looking for an opportunity to raise the subject … so when ITN came along … and caught me up a ladder helping to insulate a house … I thought fine, this will do’. She continued, ‘I didn’t calculate the effect – which looks like it will bankrupt a lot of farmers’ (Currie, 2002: 93). Her determination to communicate a long-standing anxiety about the prevalence of salmonella in eggs and her lack of calculation about the consequences of her statement meant that she was hurt and surprised by many of the reactions, both public and political, to what she had said. The outcome, in her case, something that appears to have impinged not only upon the political and policy calculations of many of those who followed her into government posts, was that it 33

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Food, risk and politics was advisable to be extremely cautious about what was shared with the general public when it came to food safety. The general public, warned and alarmed about the universality of a particular food poisoning risk, took immediate and drastic action to control the risk of personal exposure to salmonella. The immediacy and scale of the economic fallout from a single unspun and unguarded comment seems to have influenced Mrs Currie’s ministerial successors, even if it failed to motivate them to quickly refashion either the allocation of ministerial responsibilities or the relationship between ministers and officials and scientific advisors. Mrs Currie’s comment had warned of salmonella contamination but it had not informed the public about the risks of human infection. The public had precious little information to rely on about the scale of either the personal or public health threat implied by the widespread contamination of British egg production. This lack of public knowledge and understanding was shared by almost all of those who reported on Edwina Currie’s statement about salmonella in eggs. Neither the media nor the public knew much of the scientific or indeed the policy background to the minister’s statement. Almost everyone in government, not just Mrs Currie, seemed to be surprised by the extent to which consumers had exhibited what can, with good reason, be described as herd-like behaviour. Egg buyers became part of a social cascade; a cascade that led to a collapse in the British egg market. Ministers at MAFF had been in no doubt that their overriding goal – the goal of any responsible government – should be to limit damage to the egg market by reducing public anxiety; they adopted a policy response to public alarm that students of food, risk and politics meet again and again. It was imperative to reassure the public, and MAFF directed that government advertisements should stress the limited character of any threat to human health posed by salmonella in eggs. Public information advertisements offering reassurance duly appeared; though they were described as ‘falsely reassuring’ by Edwina Currie in her diary (Currie, 2002: 97). A characterisation of government announcements – issued in times of public anxiety about food-borne threats to personal health – that was subsequently endorsed by the Phillips Inquiry when it reported on BSE. Understanding the threat: salmonella and food poisoning Microbiological hazards such as Listeria monocytogenes and salmonella cannot be completely eradicated from the food chain. As Robert Seward explains in the Food Safety Handbook, an authoritative account of food hazards, surveillance strategies and risk management, ‘safe food … means doing what is practical to 34

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Salmonella and media intrusion ensure safety’. Risks, connected with the production and consumption of food, are pervasive and inescapable; they can be managed but they cannot be eradicated. Such experts direct everyone’s attention to the regulation and reduction of risk rather than the unrealistic goal of eliminating it. Seward, in common with many food safety experts concerned with and involved in regulatory actions and policy making, takes the view that ‘a key component [of food safety] is educating consumers on the responsibilities for food safety of everyone involved in the food supply chain’ (Seward, 2003: 7). From this perspective those responsible for food safety – indeed those with a vital role in food safety – must include consumers themselves. Consumers have the prime responsibility to safeguard their own health and cannot expect to subcontract that responsibility out to others, including their elected representatives. The politics of salmonella control should, it is argued, pose fundamental questions about individual as well as collective responsibility; about the responsibilities of consumers who store and prepare food, as well as any blame and responsibility that attaches to public-policy makers and their advisors when things go wrong. Representations and interpretations of risk Much of the argument about food scares and food safety emerging from the salmonella affair comes down to rival views about the respective responsibilities of producers, retailers and consumers in dealing with microbiological hazards in food. When MAFF and Department of Health officials clashed in the late 1980s over the threat that the presence of salmonella in uncooked eggs represented to public health, they were disputing, amongst other things, the practicability and need for producers to eliminate salmonella from eggs before eggs went on sale; the extent to which consumers could reasonably be expected to be guardians of their own health and the importance that should be attached to ensuring that microbiological hazards were removed from eggs during the preparation of food. Of course, disputes over the relative responsibility for food hygiene and the practicability of producing food free from microbiological contamination are much harder to convey than a single and unqualified dispute about whether or not food has been supplied pathogen free. In the case of salmonella, scientific debate and policy arguments have been (and continue to be) complicated by a number of factors to do with the pathogen, salmonella itself. Such factors are unlikely to detain the editors of national newspapers or the producers of television news programmes very long, but they do add considerably to the difficulties of making a reasoned and reasonable judgement about the part it is fair to expect elected officials to play in anticipating and managing food-related risks on our behalf. 35

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Food, risk and politics The background to the salmonella in eggs scare needs to be carefully examined in order to put public alarm, official decision-making and food safety into context. In the wake of the salmonella affair a memorandum from the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS) to the House of Commons (HoC) Agriculture Committee in 1989 explained that the pattern of food poisoning cases involving salmonella had been undergoing a marked change in the course of the 1980s. Members of the HoC Agriculture Committee needed to be aware that there was more than one form of salmonella. Salmonella typhimurium, which had been the dominant cause of food poisoning episodes, had been outpaced by food poisoning incidents involving salmonella enteritidis. While the reasons for this were far from clear it was thought possible that a dramatic increase in foreign holidays, especially holidays taken in Spain and Portugal, where enteritidis was known to be common in poultry, had played a part in the increasing frequency of salmonella enteritidis infections in the UK. Returning holidaymakers could – though it was impossible to be certain – have brought salmonella enteritidis back to Britain. It was possible that salmonella enteritidis had then been transmitted to the UK’s chicken population and from laying hens back to the human population (PHLS, 1989). North and Gorman, in their Chickengate, point to a new theory of transmission and salmonella infection, proposed by a vet, J. O’Brien (a poultry specialist), to the PHLS in a paper he presented to its Enteriditis Working Group in June 1988. The vet’s hypothesis raised the possibility that the principal cause of the rising incidence of salmonella enteritidis in food poisoning was contaminated eggs infected by the enteriditis organism when it had become lodged in the ovaries of laying hens. As North and Gorman put it, the idea of ovarian transmission was attractive to the DoH because it focused attention on egg producers and moved it away from such subjects as hospital hygiene and efficiency measures in the preparation of hospital food that had come to include a substantial increase in the use of pre-prepared cook-chill products (1990: 3, 6–17). Rival interests and sensitivities in Whitehall were identified as potentially very important shapers of a private battle within government over control of much more than a food safety agenda. Although they do not put it in these terms North and Gorman communicate strong support for the view that it is often every bit as important, for those who want to manage political and policy-making processes, to do everything they can to shape public perceptions/the political and public agenda as it is to win individual arguments about particular cases. In focusing attention on a face of power that tends to be hidden from general view, the power to determine what does and does not get discussed/enter the public domain, they followed Bachrach and Baratz (1970: 3–16), two American political scientists who asserted that power has at least two faces, one that is exposed to public gaze and another that is largely hidden 36

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Salmonella and media intrusion and ­concerned with controlling what is represented as a shared concern or matter of importance. North and Gorman leave their readers in little doubt that the widespread adoption of new methods of food preparation, most particularly ‘cooked-chill’, should be treated as a key factor in the series of salmonella outbreaks in the autumn of 1988 that alarmed senior figures at the Department of Health, including Mrs Currie and her officials. A number of those outbreaks affected vulnerable members of the public who were being catered for in publicly managed and financed institutions. Government determination to regulate and, where possible, reduce the costs of NHS hotel services, including the costs of preparing meals, was, they suggested, a powerful factor in stimulating NHS managers to adopt ‘cook-chill’ and demonstrate their ability to make hotel services in hospitals more cost-effective. However, the safety of new, more convenient and ultimately more cost­effective methods of food preparation in hospitals and elsewhere was not the key issue for the public in December 1988. Public concern was focused upon infected eggs rather than upon changes in the ways in which food was packaged and prepared, changes which, if they had dominated the public agenda, might have concentrated attention on the policies of the Department of Health rather than on the safety of eggs. In almost every instance where food safety becomes a matter of public concern the explanation and presentation of information about the nature and severity of any particular food-related risk to human health is likely to be the subject of both popular (largely non-technical) and esoteric (technical and scientific) argument. The public agenda is likely to reflect the relative success of different parties in getting others, most particularly the mass media, to accept their account of what is really going on. The complexity and disputed character of what is really happening may well be hidden from the public. In the late 1980s the safety of egg production had become a highly contentious subject. While salmonella is a pathogen (a disease-causing organism) the ease with which it can be transmitted and its ability to infect human beings is contested. Salmonella exists in hundreds of different forms, only a few of which are regularly implicated in cases of food poisoning. The details of salmonella infection transmission are frequently the subject of complex, demanding and often inconclusive scientific detective work. Ministers, including Edwina Currie, were poorly equipped to evaluate rival theories deployed officially in the late 1980s to account for the rise in salmonella infections, most especially those attributed to salmonella enteriditis. This included the theory of vertical ovarian transmission and genetic adaptation to salmonella enteritidis in laying hens, which achieved a degree of scientific acceptance in the late 1980s. Ministers had to rely on others to interpret statistical and other data about the infectivity of the pathogen 37

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Food, risk and politics and the vectors of transmission. While public-policy makers were told that the technical and scientific debates over salmonella were far from clear and disputes about such things as the vectors of transmission and the pathogenicity of salmonella enteriditis remained open, they were well aware that they could face severe criticism if they appeared indecisive. Experts acknowledged many uncertainties about salmonella; ministers and officials were told, for example, of the existence of more than 2,000 different strains of salmonella. While rates of salmonella infection rose and fell there was a lack of any scientific theory that could adequately explain these variations. Experts acknowledged that public concern about food poisoning caused by salmonella had considerable justification but they also acknowledged the limitations to their own knowledge. Cogan and Humphrey (2003, 114S), in a widely quoted paper for the Journal of Applied Microbiology, provide summary information about the changing rates of salmonella infection and the health consequences of infection with salmonella enteritidis in the UK. These two expert authors wrote, more than a decade after Mrs Currie had issued what the British press and public took to be a very serious warning, that: Although human Salmonella cases are currently at their lowest level since 1987, it is important to remember that the reasons for the dominance of Enteritidis in human infection are poorly understood and it is possible that other serovars could share similar properties and the eradication of Enteritidis may leave a niche for them to fill. (Cogan and Humphrey, 2003: 114S)

Indeed, as Cogan and Humphrey’s report on changing salmonella infection rates in the 1990s makes clear, Mrs Currie’s departure from office and subsequent changes in public policy did not result in a sharp decline in salmonella enteritidis infections: Reported cases [of salmonella infection in humans] rose from just over 10,000 cases in 1981 to a peak of nearly 33,000 cases in 1997. Salmonella enterica ssp, Enterica serovar Enteritidis, and, in particular, organisms belonging to phage type (PT) 4 of this serovar, have been largely responsible for this increase in cases. In 1981, S. Enteritidis accounted for 10% of human cases of salmonellosis; by 1997 this figure had risen to 70%. During the past 5 years, however, the number of reported cases of Salmonella in England and Wales has fallen to 16,465 in 2001 (provisional data), ca. 50% of the number of cases seen in 1997. This decline appears to be largely because of a decrease in S. Enteritidis infections, although this serovar still accounts for 65% of human Salmonella cases. In addition, the number of confirmed cases of S. Typhimurium infection is now at its lowest level since 1981 and has declined over three-fold from a peak in 1995. (114S)

No one should doubt that Salmonella infections can cause serious health problems and sometimes (if rarely) have fatal consequences. While salmonella’s 38

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Salmonella and media intrusion transmission and infectivity have been the subject of scientific enquiry and disagreement for over 100 years, ever since an American scientist, Salmon, identified the organism, most salmonella infections do clear up within a week, after causing diarrhoeal illnesses. It is only in rare cases that salmonella infection results in Reiter’s syndrome and chronic arthritis (CDC). Salmonella poses the greatest risk, as do many food-borne illnesses, to the very young and the very old and those whose immune systems have been compromised. Indeed one of the principal reasons why the Department of Health and its junior minister, Edwina Currie, became increasingly concerned about salmonella infections in the late 1980s was because outbreaks of food poisoning in British hospitals, affecting elderly patients, were on the rise. Yet salmonella is easily killed by heating and the risks of its transmission can be greatly reduced if not entirely eliminated by forms of hygiene that should be practised universally in hospitals and by those who prepare food. All this suggests at least the possibility that risks associated with food, its production, distribution and sale, and its preparation and consumption are often poorly aligned with either public perception or risk politics. Salmonella politics – insights into a bigger and a highly political picture To understand the risk politics of salmonella it is necessary to look beyond the pathogen itself and consider the economic, political and social factors that influenced farming and food safety policy in Britain in the period before Mrs Currie left office so hurriedly at the end of 1988. It is also essential to consider the ways in which advice to ministers was affected by interests and considerations that went beyond purely technical and scientific issues. Several different kinds of explanation of the salmonella scare have been promoted by close observers of British food and farming policy that do indeed take account of changes in the policy environment and the interests of key actors within government. Two prominent critics of farming and food policy, Richard North and the Conservative MP Teresa Gorman, concentrated on the unreliability and partiality of the scientific advice given to ministers and senior officials and their credulous self-interest in accepting the advice they were given. They have suggested that the advice given to and accepted by ministers was tainted and unbalanced and ought never to have been permitted to play a major role in shaping what the general public was told. Indeed they have gone further: food scares, they have suggested, are the more or less inevitable corollary of deeply unsatisfactory relationships between public-policy makers and their purportedly independent scientific advisers. Others, such as the academic observer of British food policy Martin Smith, are much less concerned with the impact of vested and short39

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Food, risk and politics term interests of ministers and their advisers. Smith, relying upon his detailed knowledge of food policy-making in the post-war era, offers a sharply contrasting account of the politics of the salmonella affair. His account is focussed on shifts and changes in a complex policy community that extends well beyond government. He examines changing relationships between farmers, producers and public-policy makers and, ultimately, consumers. Smith’s core proposition seems hard to dispute: food producers, food retailers and those engaged in making agricultural and food safety policy are not only affected by each other’s behaviour but by changes in economic and social conditions over which they have limited influence. The influence that different members of a policy community have depends not only on the authority that they can exercise openly but even more upon an ability to shape public and private agendas which must be carefully and, in rapidly changing times, constantly renegotiated. First look North How food safety and agricultural agendas are shaped and changed by actions that are mostly hidden from public eyes is one of the major themes of Richard North’s The Death of British Agriculture (2001). North has few doubts about the shortcomings of a policy-making system which depends upon government employees providing technical and scientific advice. He believes the real salmonella scare story was never told by popular journalistic and political commentators. In North’s opinion, commentators were simply unaware of how much depended on a deeply unsatisfactory relationship between government ministers and public servants – especially their scientific and expert advisers. North’s thesis, most fully developed in his Death of British Agriculture, first emerged in Chickengate which he co-wrote with Teresa Gorman. It is simple and easy to understand: scientists working for public bodies have a vested interest in providing expert advice that secures their own future employment and status; so far as practicable and consistent with this objective, experts will do what they can to assist ministers to address their most pressing political concerns. In 1990 Richard North and Teresa Gorman, then a Conservative MP, had argued in Chickengate (subtitled ‘An independent analysis of salmonella in eggs’) that the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS) should not have been relied upon or expected to provide a balanced and scientific assessment of episodes of food poisoning. Mrs Gorman was quite clear about the problem: ‘politicians dealing with public food scares demand quick and easy answers’ and the PHLS had been only too willing to supply answers based on inadequate and self­serving science. Gorman went on to explain that: 40

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Salmonella and media intrusion Rather than rely on the Public Health Laboratory Service and similar public services it would be better if the government used independent laboratories in the long-term investigation of food contamination. (North and Gorman, 1990: 115)

Teresa Gorman’s distrust of public services, including science services, and her confidence in ‘independent’ providers of scientific and technical advice led her to the conclusion that: The food industry should be encouraged to fund an independent research body or at least assemble a body of legitimate scientists to whom the media and government can turn for advice. (115)

While Mrs Gorman expressed some sympathy for her political colleague, Edwina Currie, who was a non-scientist, she felt obliged to point out that Mrs Currie had not been in a position to ‘question the authenticity of material originating from a scientific government service’. Ministers, not simply Mrs Currie, had been easily seduced by self-serving experts. A scientifically implausible explanation for what had been presented as an alarming increase in cases of food poisoning attributable to salmonella enteritidis was accepted uncritically and then promoted with enthusiasm. That enthusiasm reflected what might be described as an unholy alliance between government scientists and their nominal masters. In 1990 Teresa Gorman and Richard North were clear that despite its scientific shortcomings the attribution of a reported increase in food poisoning cases to salmonella-contaminated eggs was politically convenient. When he returned to the subject in 2001, in The Death of British Agriculture, Richard North claimed to have grounds for believing that the weaknesses he had identified in agricultural and food policy making ran very deep. Those weaknesses were amplified by credulous media coverage which reflected the very limited understanding of scientific and technical issues amongst the press. Reporters had a great deal in common with the public they supposedly served; they had little or no ability to question what they were told by politicians who relied on authoritative sources within government. The public had been, much like the journalists who reported to them, the unsuspecting dupes of a public policy making system that was self-justifying and self-serving. Policy was subservient to the interests of those who made it rather than the general public. The risks associated with food production were systematically misrepresented. Only those who were in a position to question the ‘authoritative sources’, upon which the government was said by ministers to have relied, could have exposed the flaws in the opinions that senior officials and ministers passed on to parliament, press and public in the lead-up to the salmonella scare. The public had been ill-served by officials whose expert advice to ministers was intended to demonstrate how indispensable they were. Ministers had uncritically accepted advice that was congruent with their immediate political 41

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Food, risk and politics goals and failed to appreciate its wider significance. And the public had been alarmed and misinformed because those on whom they should have been able to rely had taken little care to use their own judgement in communicating what they had been told. What North has describes as the ‘wanton destruction of a key industry’ reflects what he believes is an administrative, political and scientific pathology at the heart of British government. It was exemplified in the salmonella scare and it has been featured regularly in food scares and scandals since but all too often gone unnoticed. In the case of the salmonella scare the essential background lay in the determination of the Conservative government of the 1980s to recast the PHLS, along with other specialist organisations employing scientists and experts in the public sector, as an independent contractor. Senior staff in the PHLS could not fail to be aware that questions were being asked about the value of the work they did and the ways in which it was carried out. Such challenges to status and future employment inevitably invite a response. One part of that response, in North’s view, was the determined pursuit of strategies that would demonstrate to ministers and the wider policy community of which they were a part that public sector scientists carried out invaluable work; work that was in the national interest. A rise in reported cases of food poisoning, with many possible different explanations, called for a clear explanation from the government experts. At a time when some of the possible explanations could have been deeply embarrassing for ministers, including the possibility that the growing use of cook-chill in government establishments was the most important cause of an increasing incidence of food poisoning, a scientific explanation that the principal cause was likely to be an agricultural one fulfilled a dual purpose. It provided a justification for the Laboratory Service and offered ministers, most especially health ministers, the means to direct public attention away from long-standing and newly emerging criticisms of food preparation in the public sector, most particularly in NHS hospitals’ care for the long-term sick. The PHLS undoubtedly had an axe to grind in the mid-1980s. It was threatened with closure or privatisation. Its work on the developing problem of salmonella enteritidis infection did help to provide a justification for its continued existence. It appeared to have established that food poisoning was a much more serious problem than had previously been suspected and a growing problem in Britain. It found a pathogen that suited its political paymasters even though the science was uncertain and some, North and Gorman amongst them, would argue highly dubious. Ministers were driven by immediate political concerns to override good sense only to find themselves amongst the victims of the media feeding frenzy that they had helped to stimulate. North was able – with the benefit of hindsight (his full account of what had led up to the salmonella scare appearing more than a decade after the events themselves) – to provide a 42

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Salmonella and media intrusion ­ etailed and persuasive account of the underlying story by undertaking a ded tailed investigation – a kind of detective inquiry – into both the science or lack of it that was used to support the claim that eggs were the principal vector for the spread of salmonella. At each point in the story North found that public sector scientists, ministers and officials had accepted what suited them and shown poor judgement in doing so. The existence of self-serving motives in both the public and private sector is hardly surprising and it is nothing new. The potential for food scares is indeed ubiquitous. We need more than a detective story, however fascinating and detailed, to understand the circumstances in which salmonella infection became a national news story and to appreciate its significance in terms of the politics of food-related risk in Britain and further afield. Look South Martin Smith has done an admirable job of describing and analysing the evolving political and policy environments in which the salmonella scare took hold and in which Edwina Currie’s political career finally imploded. Far from explaining or accounting for risk events, most notably the salmonella scare, in terms of conflict, conspiracy or collusion between individual ministers, officials and government scientists, Smith refers his readers to the gradual emergence of what he describes as an issue network. The network he describes grew up in place of what had previously been a closed and essentially private food policy community. The policy community had depended upon and embodied a consensus between agricultural interests and government. The emergence of a food issue network damaged and then transformed that policy community. Indeed the gradualness of the emergence of the issue network may help to explain why some of those involved in food policy making in the late 1980s, most notably at MAFF, appeared rather dazzled and dazed by their exposure to media attention and to very public questioning in what had become an increasingly open and contentious world of food and risk policy-making. Smith is in no doubt that the food issue network and the more open world of policy making that went with it developed over several decades. The salmonella scare can, from his perspective, be viewed as a highly public and pyrotechnic display, which confirmed a substantial (even if imperceptible for some in the food policy community) process of change. The salmonella scare, according to Smith’s account of change in British politics, should be regarded as much more than a media storm. It marks, but does not explain a shift in the political environment and most particularly in British risk politics: a shift from a policy community that relied upon an uncontroversial agreement about agricultural 43

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Food, risk and politics priorities, in the post-war food economy, to a politics of food and food-related risks, where maximising agricultural output was no longer the undisputed goal of public policy. It was a shift, if Smith’s account is accepted, that reflected much more than the emergence of new interests, including the interests of the major food retailers. It certainly entailed a realignment of existing interests both within and outside of government. The salmonella scare confirmed what some ministers and journalists had suspected: virtually every facet of food policy in Britain has become capable of attracting the attention of many millions of pairs of eyes. What are the key features of the evolving policy network and the changing risk politics environment that Smith writes about? What precisely changed and why and how did it impact on food policy and public policy more generally? What longer term and broader significance has Smith’s account of the realignment of interests in the food economy and government had for farming policy, food safety and risk management? It is Smith’s contention that the long-term change from a food policy community to an issue network concerned with many different food and food-related issues, including the management and communication of food-related risks, has made the politics of food increasingly complex and difficult to predict. It has also made risk politics incomparably more public than it was in the early 1950s, when failing to maximise food production appeared to be the greatest, perhaps the only truly substantial risk in the politics of food attracting the interest of ministers. As Smith explains: The significance of the Salmonella in eggs affair is that it is indicative of wider changes in the making of food policy … The increased activity of interest groups, the impact of the common agricultural policy and changes in the retail economy have combined to transform the food policy community into an issue network. (Smith, 1991: 235)

British food policy and the gradual emergence of an issue network British food policy became a matter that merited close government attention during the Second World War – and remained so for many years after it. That attention and the intervention generated very little controversy. To begin with, a national emergency – feeding the nation in time of war and overcoming the problems created by enemy action against British shipping – provided every justification for the public authorities to do all in their power to maximise domestic food production, regulate prices and promote good nutrition. At the end of the war, during a period of economic recovery and while rationing was still in place, production remained paramount but the national government’s wartime involvement in regulating the nation’s diet gave way to rather less ­conditional 44

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Salmonella and media intrusion and qualified financial support for agricultural production. Although farmers were no longer part of the war effort they were asked to increase output and expected to be well paid. Ministers appear to have simply assumed that consumer interests were served by government collaborating as closely as possible with farmers to increase food production. As Smith points out, the 1947 Agriculture Act made it statutory requirement for government to consult farmers. It had nothing to say about asking consumers what they wanted. A separate Ministry of Food, which had existed during the wartime years, was wound up and amalgamated with the Agriculture Ministry at the beginning of the 1950s despite a warning from officials at the Ministry of Food that the combined ministry would be subject to undue pressure by farming interests and unduly influenced by it. And, in the years before Britain became part of the Common Market, subsidy payments to British farmers and agreements with food-producing Commonwealth countries meant that retailers were confident about supplies of food products for sale and relatively quiescent in making the case for lower food prices. Food was regarded in Britain’s ‘elite policy making style’, to borrow Smith’s terminology, as a technical rather than a political matter. Deeply embedded in the policy community at the amalgamated ministry for food and agriculture were leading representatives of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU). When Edwina Currie in 1988 suggested that the whole of the nation’s egg production was contaminated the NFU, almost certainly having failed to understand just how the world had changed, called for her sacking and used their political influence amongst Conservative Members of Parliament to press their case. They achieved their immediate objective but the national outcry that had made their campaign against an individual minister necessary illustrated just how far the cosy post-war consensus had been undermined. The farming lobby’s power had been declining for many years. Other, and increasingly well-organised, commercial interests had been acquiring influence and the power to rival (and exceed) the political as well as the economic clout of the farmers. Most important amongst those organised interests were the largest food retailers, including Sainsbury’s and Tesco, whose monopsony power along with their political influence had been growing steadily through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Their expanding retail floor space contrasted with the declining economic importance of small and ‘independent’ food retailers. The big supermarket retailers were joined by – indeed they were often coterminous with – another well-organised and commercial business interest: food manufacturers; manufacturers who prepare food and package it before it goes on sale to the general public. A number of these companies, such as Associated British Foods and Northern Foods, grew rapidly by acquisition and had greatly extended the range of activities in which they were commercially engaged over 45

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Food, risk and politics the same three decades. They had also become true commercial heavyweights by adding substantially to the monetary value of farm output as they turned agricultural produce into retail goods. The interests of these companies could no longer be assumed to be aligned with those of the membership of the NFU. Although consumer interests were not directly represented by the food manufacturers and retailers they had every incentive to represent themselves as distinct from the farmers and communicate their commitment to the welfare and best interests of ordinary consumers as strongly as they could. They had an obvious interest in claiming to speak on behalf of consumers and their interests – even if that meant speaking out against other interests, including those of farmers and politicians, who appeared unwilling to put the interests of their customers first. Major retailers and food manufacturers were not alone in marking out territory where they expected and demanded to be consulted and involved in framing and implementing food policy and other public policies that affected the production, sale and consumption of food. Though they may not have been as quickly off the mark or as well financed, the British Medical Association, along with a number of other professional groups, have become deeply engaged in a widening public discussion of food policy. The reasons for the growing interest shown by health professionals in food and food-related issues are not difficult explain; nutrition is universally recognised as a key factor, often the key factor, in personal and public health. As post-war austerity gave way to a time of plenty it was inevitable that health professionals would be joined by others who wanted to join the high table where food and food-related issues were discussed and public policy was being fashioned and re-fashioned. Lobbyists of all kinds have entered the political and policy-making arena representing commercial and professional interests as well as the interests of concerned citizens. The Soil Association, which traces its history back to 1943, has been joined by numerous other organisations which also claim to represent the public interest when it comes to food quality and food safety. Canute went down to the sea to dispel any ideas amongst his subjects that he had extraordinary powers. The policy community, which Smith argues had to give way to an issue network, where food production and food-related risks were concerned, might have benefited from being led by someone with a comparable insight into at least some of the kinds of changes that shape markets and political systems. Unlike the farmers and public officials who had grown up within the food policy community many of those who have played a leading role in the development of Britain’s largest food retailers, food manufacturers and the most successful food campaigns have demonstrated great understanding and skill in operating in an issue network, where the competition for ministers’ attention and public interest and support has become intense. 46

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Salmonella and media intrusion The competition has created a new dynamic in food policy and in risk politics which should not be underestimated in breaking up old alliances and challenging those who regarded interests, so far as food policy was concerned, as common and mutually reinforcing. Given the growth of consumer lobbying, in what had become a highly competitive retail grocery market, retailers had very good reason to listen carefully to what lobbyists, who claimed to be knowledgeable about food safety and food quality and also to have insights into what the public wanted, had to say. Smith acknowledges this and articulates the growing importance of the interaction between consumers, retailers, food manufacturers and lobbyists in the 1980s and subsequently. He emphasises how adept the major retailers have become at attending and being seen to attend to consumers’ concerns: Individual retailers, and their trade association, the Retail Consortium … lobbied government on various food issues including food radiation, BSE and salmonella in eggs. For example, the supermarkets have attacked the government over its secret use of the hormone BST for increasing milk production. (Smith, 1991: 247)

According to a Waitrose spokesman, ‘The government keeps saying that BST is safe, but we know our customers are concerned and we have no way to reassure them’ (Guardian, 22 July 1988). While food processors have found it difficult to develop trade associations and organise to resist retail pressure, the retailers have become increasingly economically and politically important. The relative power of the retailers in the issue network reflects the success of their enterprises as well as the changing economics and market position of British agriculture. Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community left farmers much further away from some of the key levers of agricultural policy-making and made farm prices the subject of international negotiations and competitive forces. The biggest retailers were increasingly willing and able to drive a hard bargain so that they could offer food to the consumer at the most competitive prices. If they did not sell what farmers and food processors provided, then farmers and food processors were likely to find it increasingly difficult to get their products to market. And, as Smith fully appreciates, retailers – like many lobbyists who were empowered by the development of a food issue network – were far from being the automatic allies of government. Retailers have in fact taken the lead in introducing such things as food labelling and promoting the regulation of additives in the foods they sell. This may not always be quite what it may seem or be presented as, an unqualified commitment to healthier food, but it cannot be doubted that it sends very powerful messages to shoppers about who is, and is not, likely to be on their side. And, while the power of retailers has grown the economic position of farmers has generally become weaker. There are many fewer farmers and agriculture ­accounts for much 47

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Food, risk and politics less employment and economic activity than it did in the years immediately after the Second World War. Both markets in food and the world of public policy-making have had to adapt to the economic, not just the political, impacts of changes in consumer behaviour influenced by bad news stories about food. Some participants in the contemporary food issue network have been more adept and better organised to adapt to the changed media and economic environment than others. The big retailers are acutely aware that alarms about particular foods are unlikely to be contained within any single locality. Purchasers of food in modern Britain buy foods from retailers who transport their products over hundreds and even thousands of miles and distribute them widely. News, particularly bad news, about the food they purchase is likely to reach millions of shoppers within hours. A very small number of often highly competitive news organisations have, since the early 1960s, been in a position to alert the whole of the British public to threats to their safety associated with any goods on general sale, not just food. Broadcasters, making their own independent news judgements, have had the ability, and have been aware that they have the ability to make announcements that can dramatically alter consumer behaviour (Beardsworth and Keil, 1997: 164–166). It is impractical for farmers, food manufacturers, food retailers or government regulators to insulate the food markets from bad news stories. The replacement of a policy community with an issue network, which is no less vulnerable to news of food threats than the public itself, means that issue networks themselves can be subject to sudden and potentially highly destabilising bad food stories. The potent combination of news organisation rivalries and an issue (as opposed to policy) network, demonstrated by the salmonella scare, took many of those most deeply involved in food and food safety policy by surprise. Subsequent events suggest that policy makers were unwilling or unable to acknowledge just how profound a change the replacement of a relatively orderly policy community by a food issue network had been. It is a change that readers of this book are most unlikely to be able to ignore. It is part of the very kernel of the contemporary risk politics of food.

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3 An inspector calls: Pennington, E. coli and disaster science

Wishaw and the E. coli outbreak Hugh Pennington writes, in When Food Kills (2003: 1), that: ‘just as Glen Coe is remembered for its massacre … Wishaw will forever be associated with its lethal outbreak of E. coli O157’. At the time of the outbreak Pennington was a professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University. He was asked to chair an inquiry into the outbreak of E. coli O157 in the town of Wishaw, located in central Scotland, shortly after the outbreak began in the autumn of 1996. The year 1996 was already remarkable in the annals of food scares and scandals. In the spring it had been announced in the House of Commons that it was now thought likely that the cause of a new brain disease in humans, known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) (discussed in Chapter 4), had probably been a new and poorly understood disease agent responsible for the cattle disease, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), which had quickly been labelled ‘mad cow disease’ by the British press. E. coli O157, compared with the previously unknown vCJD, was a pathogen that had long been associated with food-borne disease and, as will be discussed here, had been identified with a common effect of food poisoning, diarrhoea. E. coli O157 was generally thought to be transmitted in food – especially meats – contaminated with animal faeces; something that was particularly likely to occur when basic standards of hygiene in the storage and preparation of food had broken down. The Wishaw outbreak first came to light when a stool sample from a fiveyear-old child, suffering with diarrhoea, was found to contain E. coli O157. The scientist in charge of the Scottish laboratory where the finding had been made, Kenneth Liddell, began urgent enquires and prepared for a major investigation to identify the source of an infection that he knew could prove deadly. He quickly found that the child’s illness was not an isolated event. Liddell had previous experience of an E. coli O157 outbreak at a Scottish psychiatric 49

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Food, risk and politics hospital (some six years earlier) when four patients had died. On this occasion the initial disturbing laboratory findings confirmed the vulnerability of the young and the very old; the number of reports of the disease having struck elderly Wishaw residents multiplied rapidly and generated considerable media interest. Early on in the search for a source three cases were found where there was a common link to sandwiches, containing meat, which had been bought from a local butcher’s called ‘John Barr’. The butcher’s shop, owned and managed by John Barr, stood alongside a bakery where John Barr’s son Martin ran the business. Martin Barr’s business sold such things as meat pies, which, at least to begin with, John Barr assured environmental health officials had no connection with his business. Pennington himself simply notes that the claim that the two businesses operated separately turned out to be false. Within a few days the single case had been joined by another thirty. Infected individuals were said to be ‘queuing up to be admitted to hospital’ (Pennington, 2003: 5). Local health services quickly found themselves under substantial pressure, and press and television interest in what was happening in Wishaw extended well beyond central Scotland. The need for a major and highly organised public health effort to control the outbreak and identify its source was obvious to everyone concerned. An outbreak control team visited John Barr’s premises and found that initial reports that he was operating a small retail business in Wishaw were wholly misleading. Barr’s business was at the centre of meat processing in central Scotland and supplied many customers, including other retailers. John Barr himself, as soon became apparent to public health officials, was in fact a leading member of the Scottish Federation of Meat Traders Association and widely known in the meat trade throughout Scotland. As Hugh Pennington records, in his account of his own role in investigating the outbreak and the way it which it was handled once the first laboratory results were known, Barr had been voted the Scottish butcher of the year in 1996; an irony that was, eventually, lost on very few people. The E. coli O157 outbreak which Pennington was asked by the Scottish Secretary to inquire into was declared over on 20 January 1997. During the two months it lasted, 512 cases of infection were identified. The laboratory investigations attributed the Wishaw outbreak to a particular strain of E. coli O157 known as strain 279. Twenty deaths were attributed to E. coli infection during the period of the official outbreak and two further E. coli-related deaths occurred in the area early in 1997. Seventeen of the deaths were traced directly to the contaminated meat products from Wishaw. While many of those who died were elderly they were, apart from their infection with E. coli O157, generally believed to be in good health. It seemed that large numbers of people, who should have been able to trust that the food they purchased locally, ­supplied by 50

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science a well-known local butcher and meat processor, had been badly let down and some had paid with their lives. There was never any dispute that E. coli O157 should not have posed a threat to the health of Wishaw’s population. If well-known and very basic standards of food hygiene and storage had been followed, infected meat would not have left Barr’s premises. Pennington was asked by the Conservative Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth MP, to head the inquiry of an expert group into the outbreak and to look beyond the immediate questions of individual culpability to the wider questions of food safety that the outbreak had raised. Understanding E. coli O157 Most strains of the E. coli bacteria are thought to be harmless and some may even be beneficial to humans. E. coli bacteria are found routinely in the guts of humans and farm animals and do not appear to be pathogenic. A rare strain of the E. coli bacteria, E. coli O157: H7, is believed to be responsible for the majority of life-threatening illnesses. E. coli O157: H7 has been held responsible for a serious intestinal pathology that can lead on to life-threatening haemorrhages. Ingestion of as few as ten organisms may cause intestinal haemorrhaging and result, in a minority of those infected, in kidney failure. There is no cure for infection with E. coli O157: H7. Scientific research has been pursued to develop a vaccine – without success. The ubiquity of E. coli organisms that are non-pathogenic and which may even be beneficial to humans, poses a considerable problem to those attempting to develop a vaccine: distinguishing friend from foe, or at least from neutral, is scientifically challenging and may have, if reflected in and applied to disease control in the form of a vaccine, undesired consequences for human health. A very determined approach to prevention and control is, for that reason, generally regarded as the best approach to reducing risks of E. coli O157 infection. Controlling risk in this sense depends on high standards of food hygiene and on keeping raw meat separate from other foods. That was – or certainly should have been – the principal task for ‘John Barr’ and for those whose role it was to regulate meat processors and butchers’ premises such as Barr’s in Wishaw and elsewhere in Britain. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), based in Atlanta, USA, describe Escherichia coli O157:H7 as: ‘an emerging cause of food-borne illness’. CDC has estimated that 73,000 cases of infection and 61 deaths occur in the United States each year. Most illness associated with E. coli O157 are said to be linked to eating undercooked contaminated ground beef. Personto-person spread may also play a part in its transmission. Infection can also 51

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Food, risk and politics occur after drinking unpasteurised milk and swimming in or drinking sewage­contaminated water. It is the powerful toxin that E. coli O157:H7 produces that causes severe illnesses in some of those who are infected with the bacterium. The CDC points, in its public information for US consumers, to an outbreak of severe diarrhoea in the United States in 1982 that was traced to contaminated hamburgers, something that awakened the public authorities to the severity of the threat to public health that E. coli O157:H7 posed. However, control of E. coli O157 raises a number of difficulties to which the CDC has drawn attention: contaminated meat is likely to look and smell normal and only a small number of organisms need to be present to cause disease. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in raising the awareness of the public and food retailers is the fact that the severity of the illnesses caused by E. coli O157 is highly variable. Some of those infected suffer with a diarrhoea and fever lasting no more than five to ten days whereas others develop complications that are life-threatening. Treatment can be difficult and it has been suggested that the use of antibiotics may raise rather than reduce the risk of the kidney complications associated with the serious morbidity that sometimes follows infection with E. coli O157. Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome (HUS) is the life-threatening condition that arises in a small percentage (estimated by CDC at 3–5 per cent of cases of E. coli O157 infections); a condition requiring intensive medical care. Another complication of E. coli O157 infection, known as thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), is mentioned by Pennington in his account of his investigation of the Wishaw E. coli outbreak and of his exploration of what he refers to as disaster science. Like HUS, TTP can cause serious organ damage; damage to the small blood vessels that supply both the kidneys and the brain. E. coli O157 infection does not cause its greatest damage by entering the bloodstream or tissues directly but acts indirectly through the production of toxins that travel around the body, while the E. coli pathogen itself remains in the intestines. However, Pennington insists that it is important to remember that only a small minority of those infected with E. coli O157 develop either HUS or TTP. Indeed, many people who are infected by the bacterium do not show any symptoms at all. Despite this the ubiquity and pathogenic potency of E. coli O157 does mean that it is a serious threat to large numbers of people, especially the young and the old, if food hygiene control measures fail. In a controversial public statement Hugh Pennington suggested that E. coli infections might be responsible for up to 1,000 deaths each year in the UK and pointed directly to 24 deaths in 1999, which he believed could be traced to E. coli infections acquired on farms in the UK (Meredith, 2000).

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science An inspector calls While sporadic cases of E. coli O157 infection are likely to pass with little or no public comment the Wishaw outbreak was different. It was different both because of the public awareness and political sensitivity to food-borne threats to health at the time of the outbreak in 1996, not just because of the size of the outbreak. Public interest and political sensitivity made it imperative that the authorities took speedy action and one aspect of the official response was undoubtedly intended to show that government remained in control. The easiest way of giving the impression that this was the case was to mount a rigorous and independent investigation. The Scottish Office understood this very well, with patients dying and a rapidly growing number of admissions to the hospital in Wishaw. Constant media probing was best answered by at least giving the appearance of ministerial action. The media, not unreasonably, wanted to know how serious the situation was, what was being done about it and, most especially, how the outbreak had started and could now be contained. Ministers found themselves under pressure to show that they understood and were capable of responding to growing public anxiety; an inquiry seemed to underline a determination, at the top of government, to ensure that no stone would be left unturned in finding out what had happened and in devising the means to prevent anything of the kind happening again. Pennington, well aware of political imperatives, points out in his account of the Wishaw outbreak, that in cases where highly qualified and competent public health officials are quickly in place and empowered to act, an inquiry into an outbreak of the kind that occurred in Wishaw is likely to address one of the most immediate needs of the local population: reassurance that something is being done to get to the bottom of what is happening, by people who are both expert and independent. Politicians, by contrast with the professionals on the ground, are likely to be severely restricted in what they are able to do personally. They can confirm that everything that can reasonably be done is being done and offer words of reassurance to the public, but ministers who attempt to answer detailed questions and make definite pronouncements in the face of a major outbreak are running the risk of being contradicted by the specialists on whose management of the immediate crisis they claim to rely. If they are sensible, in Pennington’s view, they will ask those who really know what they’re talking about to respond to media and public enquiries without intervening directly in the process themselves. Ministers may be able to direct additional resources to those who are in the front line, and who play the principal role in managing an outbreak. In the longer term they may be able to take the credit for doing so, but they are generally ill advised in trying to micromanage the immediate crisis. In such 53

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Food, risk and politics c­ ircumstances the most attractive option for political figureheads is to announce a rigorous and independent investigation or inquiry. That is precisely what Michael Forsyth, the Secretary of State for Scotland at the time of the Wishaw outbreak, did. In accepting the need for and establishing an inquiry at the earliest possible moment, the Secretary of State was required to make a number of key decisions about the inquiry. Who should lead it? If the everyday arrangements for inspection and regulation had failed, then retaining public confidence required all those in government to show that they were prepared to open the books to someone capable of making informed and independent judgements and then sharing them – whatever ministers might want – with the general public. Hugh Pennington’s personal standing, expertise in bacteriology and his reputation for scientific integrity made him an obvious choice for a Secretary of State who wanted to demonstrate that he was acting decisively, remained in command of the machinery of government in Scotland and was prepared to face up to the findings of an independent investigation regardless of the discoveries that it made. Hugh Pennington’s observation, that: Michael Forsyth … did what ministers in a similar position had done before time and time again for a hundred years and more (Pennington, 2003: 15)

does not suggest that he was either an innocent abroad in the political world or a naive scientist who did not appreciate the political and public relations considerations that strongly influence governmental decision making about establishing a public inquiry. Pennington, despite his observation that: inquiries that follow disasters in England are very English in their administrative heterogeneity [and the labyrinthine] legal structures that underpin them (198)

knew that he was being invited to serve a political purpose as well as a public safety one. The inquiry, in which he accepted the leading role, had to work and report quickly. He was told that it would operate as an expert group meeting in private. He believed that an inquiry – even one that was given a very demanding set of goals (and asked to work quickly and in private) – could serve a useful scientific and public purpose. When risk politics bestrides the political stage the independent inquiry can be presented as a rapier that is capable of quickly getting at the truth and, less plausibly, identifying what needs to be done. Whether it can play such a role depends on the skills and determination of those involved and political and economic factors that are harder to control.

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science The strengths and the limitation of the inquiry The case that Pennington makes for independent inquiries into food disasters in his book on disaster science and food safety relies heavily on arguments about the utility of inquiries derived from the reflections of an inveterate inquiry chairman, the lawyer Louis Blom-Cooper. When the inspector calls, Pennington suggests, he can use the authority of government and the public expectations that his appointment has created, to deliver, if necessary, telling criticisms of public policy and the proposals to remedy any shortcomings that he finds. However, to do so, the inquirer must be politically astute and determined, and willing and able to set an agenda for reform and improvement. Blom-Cooper is a noted proponent of the well-directed inquiry rapier in the hands of an investigator who is committed to getting at the truth irrespective of who may be embarrassed by that process. Blom-Cooper gives five reasons for establishing and supporting public inquiries/independent investigations of issues of public concern that address important questions about the efficacy and appropriateness of investigatory processes, in which independent and expert analysts are invited in to seek answers to difficult questions of public concern. The first of the five reasons BlomCooper gives has already been referred to above: inquiries are a good way of responding to public anxiety, horror and/or outrage in the immediate aftermath of shocking and tragic events. The precise inquiry process chosen to do this almost always raises questions about timeliness, speed and powers. A key issue for investigators/inquirers is the realism of the timetable set out for their work and the degree of support, including financial, for the work that they believe needs to be done. Of course, a great danger of any inquiry process is that it diminishes the pressures (political, economic, legal and social) to get something done; inquiries, to use the British political vernacular, can be used to kick an issue into the long grass. Pennington accepted a commission to lead an inquiry that did not allow time for the grass to grow. The second reason for establishing an inquiry process is that it allows for the appointment of someone who can be held up as being independent of the public authorities and who can be presented as willing and able to explore matters of grave public concern, without fear or favour. In a society such as Britain, where the government and the Prime Minister in particular have enormous powers of patronage, the independence of those who accept a government invitation to investigate acts of omission and commission on the part of the authorities is, almost certainly (and with good reason) often suspect. Pennington himself was concerned that his reliance on information provided by public officials might be viewed as compromising his inquiry’s independence. At the end of the process he declared himself satisfied that ‘our report was not found 55

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Food, risk and politics wanting’ in terms of its independence and rigour (2003: 205). Pennington had, he believed, also been empowered to look beyond the understandable anguish and concern of those most directly affected, the people of Wishaw who had been made ill and who had, in some cases, lost close relatives, in order to address questions of public policy of concern to the whole of the population. This was the third of Blom-Cooper’s reasons for establishing an inquiry: the inquiry’s ability to consider the bigger picture. The ability of inquiries to do this is perhaps the most contentious of the justifications that are provided for establishing them; a matter of some importance in every subsequent chapter. Blom-Cooper’s fourth reason for supporting inquiries was that such inquiries fulfil an essential public purpose because they offer victims and their relatives the opportunity to have their concerns expressed and addressed publicly. While the airing of grievances can be facilitated by independent inquiries it is far from certain that feelings of injustice can be alleviated, entirely removed or at least reduced in the course of an inquiry or when its findings are made public. However, if the alternative is government acting as judge and jury in its own cause then inquiries can help to moderate feelings of injustice and provide public officials and ministers with a commentary on their actions that isn’t obviously open to the charge that it is contrived and self-serving. Of course the most important reason normally given for holding an inquiry is that it provides a route to the truth, a way of establishing what really happened and identifying the lessons that need to be learnt and the remedies that should be adopted. Faith in the ability of independent inquiries to get at the truth and to make recommendations, so that the risk of things going wrong in future can be reduced, may be misplaced and will generally depend on the willingness of those in authority to accept the analysis and conclusions of the inquirers that they have appointed. The Wishaw inquiries It is important to point out that Pennington’s reliance on Blom-Cooper’s arguments does not mean, as we shall see later, that he considered that inspectors/ investigators/regulators could expect to operate without limits and without encountering severe difficulties, especially if their findings threatened to embarrass the politicians who had appointed them. Challenging entrenched interests, as Pennington freely acknowledges, is likely to take more than even the most skilfully handled rapier wielded by an independent inquirer. Indeed, inquirers/ inspectors/investigators/regulators and the like are unlikely to achieve much, when they encounter opposition from strongly entrenched interests, without 56

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science strong support from public opinion. In exploring some of the shortcomings of statutory instruments fashioned in response to food-borne threats to public health it will be clear to the reader that Pennington’s judicious assessment of the parts that politics and economics play in risk regulation reflected his own highly developed political instincts, not just a command of bacteriology. The impact of what Pennington calls disaster science and the inquiry process examined here, particularly towards the end of the chapter, will be considered in the light of the work of Richard Schofield and Jean Shaoul (2000). Their research, conducted after Pennington’s expert inquiry had been published and time had been allowed for it to be digested and reflected in legislation and enforcement, examined the economic and political environment that shaped food safety policy in the 1990s and the inadequacies of the statutory framework and enforcement systems fashioned in the 1990s, to the task of regulating the meat trade and protecting the interests of consumers. Their work provides excellent grounds for arguing that public anxiety about food safety, however inarticulate it may sometimes appear to be, expresses a concern about the private and most particularly the commercial interests that are capable of trumping all other interests, including those of consumers, in the politics of food and in risk politics more generally. Schofield and Shaoul’s work can and should be viewed as building on the insights that Pennington provides into the strengths and weaknesses of inquiries, and qualifying any optimism about what inquiries can achieve, however well conducted, focused on singular events and attracting even the most intense public interest and the greatest media coverage. The inquiry that Michael Forsyth asked Hugh Pennington to conduct was partnered by a fatal accident enquiry (FAI) into the deaths in Wishaw caused by E. coli O157 infection. Unlike Pennington’s inquiry, the FAI, which was announced on 3 December 1996, was legally very tightly drawn and intensely focused on the twenty deaths that had occurred. FAI’s are normally established to look into deaths in employment or in custody. The Secretary of State for Scotland took advantage of a provision in the Fatal Accident Inquiry Act of 1976 which permitted him to set up an inquiry when it appeared: … expedient in the public interest … on the grounds that death was sudden, suspicious or unexplained [or had] occurred in circumstances such as to give rise to serious public concern. (Pennington, 2003: 16)

There could be little dispute that the deaths in Wishaw satisfied such a test. Pennington’s expert inquiry, to be conducted in private, was therefore complemented by an enquiry undertaken by a public official, the Sheriff, whose job it was to establish: 57

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Food, risk and politics (1) Where and when a death had occurred; (2) the cause of death [and] any accident that had resulted in death; (3) precautions that might have been taken to avoid death and/or any accident resulting in death; (4) defects in any system of working which contributed to death or any accident resulting in death; and (5) any other facts which are relevant to the circumstances of the death. (2003: 16)

Pennington and the sheriff at work Pennington and his team were asked to ‘examine the circumstances which led to the outbreak in the central belt of Scotland and to advise on the implications of food safety and the general lessons to be learned’. The FAI and Pennington’s expert team were able to call on HOLMES (the Home Office Local Major Enquiry System), which was, by the standards of the mid-1990s, an advanced IT system, purpose-built to manage the data generated by a major investigation. Pennington also received assurances that his work would be well resourced in other ways. It would be supported by senior Scottish Office staff and he had freedom to call on all those he judged necessary to give evidence. He was assured that his freedom to make recommendations would not be compromised by the involvement of senior Scottish Office officials; he was in fact, as he reports, left in no doubt that the officials he worked with believed that food safety systems needed to be reformed and could be radically improved. The Secretary of State expected and, in the event, received a set of priority recommendations by the end of the year; they were delivered within thirty-three days of the establishment of Pennington’s expert group. The idea that an independent expert, leading a well-resourced team of coworkers, can get to the bottom of what has gone wrong in a disease outbreak, is the touchstone of an inquiry process that brings outsiders in to make judgements and give advice about exceptional events that call into question the competence of public officials and the adequacy of the systems they operate. The ability to first command public respect and then retain public support, even if findings and recommendations threaten to undercut the position of officials and ministers, is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for any successful inquiry. Pennington’s team and the FAI managed a process that was, by the standards of British inquiries and investigations, exceptionally thorough and quick. It was also remarkably cheap. The culpability of John Barr for the Wishaw outbreak was established beyond all reasonable doubt. The Sheriff concluded that: The scale of Barr’s turnover was such that he ought to have engaged a food hygiene consultant to [advise him] on how to manage safety within [his] premises. He should have ensured that his staff had basic training in food ­hygiene including cleaning. I

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science have no doubt Mr John Barr liked a clean shop and maintained a clean shop. What he failed to do was to maintain a safe shop and the main ingredient of his failure was ignorance of the requirements which would produce that result. (reported in Pennington, 2003: 21)

But the sheriff found that the exposure of the Wishaw public to avoidable risks from E. coli O157 infection could not be laid wholly at John Barr’s door. There had been major shortcomings in the way in which the safety of his premises, where meats were prepared and from which they were distributed over a wide area, had been inspected; there had been serious and repeated failures in the enforcement of key statutory hygiene provisions needed to ensure the safety of meat sold to the public. What was established in the course of the fatal accident inquiry was that an inspection process undertaken in a mechanical fashion, which meets the minimum requirements of legislation, can utterly fail to identify and correct hazardous practices. John Barr and those who inspected his premises to assess and ensure the safety of food preparation were well known to one another; the inspectors had shown very little willingness to question what happened there. As the Sheriff pointed out in the conclusion to his report: The practices in Barr’s according to Mr John Barr were longstanding. They were flawed. If they were observed by successive inspectors then there is no note in the file to this effect. If they were not detected they ought to have been. (Reported in Pennington, 2003: 64)

Legislation and inspection are necessary but very far from sufficient to guarantee food safety for the public. Inspection needs to be thorough, based on a truly informed understanding of risk and undertaken in a way that insists on its independence. It needs to be – and to be seen to be – independent of anyone who might have an interest in compromising its thoroughness. Barr had found ways round the inspection regime and he had, until the Wishaw outbreak, been able to do so with impunity. The FAI criticisms, for any who chose to study them closely, had great ramifications for food safety inspection throughout Scotland and for the whole of the UK’s food industries. The criticisms in the FAI identified habits that there was every reason to suspect might be widespread and hazardous to the general public. However, identification of particular local shortcomings and the risks of faecal contamination associated with them were far from sufficient to ensure better public protection and future safety. Where Pennington hoped that the work of his group could serve the wider public, by applying lessons learnt or re-learnt at Wishaw, he drew attention to the need to make the very best use of strategies that would encourage a thorough and thoughtful application of food safety measures. As Pennington 59

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Food, risk and politics explains in When Food Kills: My group made many recommendations about the prevention of E. coli O157 infections. They ran from farms, through slaughterhouses, meat production premises and butchers shops to the point of consumption; enforcement, surveillance, research, and the handling and control of outbreaks … there was nothing new or revolutionary about them. Many were just plain common sense. There was a central theme, the accelerated implementation of HACCP. (2003: 202)

Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points HACCP is the acronym for Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points. It is a methodology that can be used to analyse potential hazards in almost any activity. It is intended to focus attention on those things which it is most important to observe and regulate in order to ensure the safety of the public. In any production and distribution process there are likely to be a number of critical control points. They are points in a process or activity at which there is a particularly acute risk of things going wrong; things that can endanger others, most particularly people who will be involved later and, most especially when it comes to applying HACCP to the production and distribution of food for human consumption, the consumer. The more carefully the most potentially damaging consequences of mistakes in any production process are considered and their source traced back, through production and distribution, to the point at which they are most likely to arise, the better the interests of consumers are likely to be safeguarded. Controls can take many different forms and in food production controls can include the proper training and education of staff, the use of the right equipment to store and transport food, and rigorous checks or audits undertaken in circumstances, and applied at points where experience suggests that things are most likely to go wrong. In drawing on his own experience of institutional failings Hugh Pennington relates the story of Stanley Royd, an NHS hospital, which, because of basic hygiene and food preparation failures, jeopardised the lives of its patients. There were regular inspections of the kitchens but they failed utterly to initiate the changes needed to protect the hospital’s patients. Environmental Health inspectors, despite being regular visitors to Stanley Royd hospital, followed a routine which skirted around the principal risks to patients’ health in the kitchen where their meals were prepared. The inspectors were unduly influenced by their inability to mount prosecutions (at a time when the NHS ‘enjoyed’ a legal immunity from prosecution) and produced reports that simply avoided dealing with the most serious risks of food contamination. 60

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science In commending and recommending HACCP Pennington was, in his own words, aware ‘there was a palpable lack of enthusiasm about HACCP’. He concluded that: Official expertise seemed to reside in enumerating difficulties rather than finding solutions to them. (2003: 203)

Pennington and his expert team were well aware that achieving full compliance with safety standards and encouraging the wholehearted adoption of HACCP by small food businesses meant overcoming numerous obstacles. His team advocated a system of local authority licensing, making the granting of a licence conditional on businesses meeting a number of key requirements for the introduction of HACCP. They were aware not only of the hostility of many small businesses to extra costs but also of the ‘deregulatory ethos [embraced by the] Conservative government’. Their proposals were politically unattractive to many of Michael Forsyth’s party. Pennington himself understood very well that he was dealing with the Secretary of State whose political position as a Scots MP was under threat. The Secretary of State was, with good reason, keen to show that he was doing a great job of protecting the interests of Scots in general. Forsyth represented Stirling in the House of Commons – a seat that was likely to be hotly contested by rivals from other parties. He had a motive to try hard and to listen carefully to what Pennington had to say; he had, after all, issued the invitation to Pennington to lead the Wishaw inquiry. In the event Forsyth lost his seat at the 1997 General Election; his strong support for Pennington’s work bore him no electoral fruit. Pennington’s interim report, delivered just before the end of 1996, and his subsequent final report, delivered in April 1997, made recommendations which he had good reason to believe Scottish Office officials supported, indeed one of those officials had been a key member of his expert inquiry team. The final report made thirty-two recommendations, all of which were accepted by the government. Among the main recommendations were: • • • • •

Introduction of lessons at school in food handling Improved training for abattoir workers Measures to increase E. coli awareness programmes amongst farm workers Licences for butchers, requiring them to train staff in food hygiene The enforced separation of raw and cooked meats in food preparation.

Pennington’s key recommendation, on licensing butchers in order to drive the take-up of HACCP, did not come into force until October 2000, three years after he and his team had made it.

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Food, risk and politics The inquiry rapier seen in perspective and in context Despite his commitment to an inquiry process that enabled him to draw on the knowledge of senior Scottish Office staff and to make use of the funds, access and authority that came with leadership of the expert inquiry team, and the Secretary of State’s urging to expedite the work, Pennington’s detailed and careful account of risk politics and food safety is incomplete. It offers only a partial picture of risk politics in the control of E. coli O157 and of food safety and the factors that hamper and obstruct food safety regimes. The targets of public opprobrium, following the Wishaw outbreak, were local businessmen and local inspectors. They were held responsible for the lack of safety and the failures to identify hazards and operate an effective inspection regime. Pennington devotes a good deal of his attention to attitudes which hinder food safety and often attract little commercial and political hostility – especially when threats to food safety go unnoticed, as they do a great deal of the time. In his discussion of the limits to inspection Pennington highlights those aspects of health and safety regimes which are most readily perceived as inconvenient, unnecessarily intrusive and expensive. While public interest in particular aspects of food safety waxes and wanes with the headlines, and inspectors face constant pressure to go native, it may be, as Richard Schofield and Jean Shaoul have insisted, that conflicts over food safety regulation which inhibit the effectiveness of inspection will be found to lie deep within the very organisation and structure of food production, distribution and sales. They make a powerful and persuasive case for believing that market structure has, almost imperceptibly, shaped and constrained public policy and, most importantly, the operation of Britain’s food safety regimes and the enforcement of food safety regulations. Unequal forces in risk politics and food safety Schofield and Shaoul, in a remarkable and detailed investigation of the food industry carried out in the late 1990s, focus their attention on the processing and sale of meat products and the reconfiguration of the food safety regulation regime to protect consumers. They pay particular attention to the economics of meat processing and the risks of transmitting E. coli O157 infection from animals to humans. They suggest that these risks are most acute when there are failures in the enforcement of critical hygiene measures. The findings of their research and analysis, published in the journal Public Administration in 2000, provide students of risk politics and food safety with a key resource for understanding how the identification and management of food hazards, in a rapidly 62

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science changing food industry dominated by highly profitable companies, grew more rather than less problematic as the structure of food industries changed. The changes in the structure of food industries, which they believe hold the key to declining standards of food hygiene and public safety, were well under way by the end of the 1960s and, in Schofield and Shaoul’s opinion, accelerated in the 1980s. Those changes included the expansion of a small number of major food retailers and have led to their market dominance. They also included the growth in market power of specialist companies, especially renderers, who provided vital services to other food industry companies. Schofield and Shaoul conclude that whatever insights can be gained from the study of particular failures in the enforcement of food safety regulations, and no matter how thoughtfully legislation to improve food safety, including the enforcement of meat hygiene regulations, may be drawn up, the forces which changed the market structure of the food industries in the final quarter of the twentieth century greatly weakened the ability of some companies to satisfy public regulations designed to ensure that food was safe, and helped to make government increasingly cautious about how far it could go in asserting a public interest where it was held to be at odds with the goals of the country’s most successful food companies. The power of some parts of the food industry, major retailers and, most especially, renderers to dictate terms of trade in the industry created the circumstances in which weaknesses in the enforcement of hygiene standards were bound to be heightened and to heighten food-borne risks to public health. In presenting their findings Schofield and Shaoul constantly express their dismay at the ways in which consumer interests, which they believe depend on the existence of a well-resourced and genuinely independent public food safety enforcement regime, have been overridden by the most powerful food producers and retailers. They argue, for example, that those companies are engaged in forms of competition and in a search for increased profitability that has been especially damaging to the ability of abattoirs to meet all of their statutory obligations to ensure meat products are safe. The target of much of Schofield and Shaoul’s criticism, the 1990 Food Safety Act and the Food Standards Agency, are seen by others as serving the public interest and introducing changes advocated by Phillip James in his report for New Labour’s leaders written in advance of the 1997 General Election. Schofield and Shaoul describe them as deficient in conception, design and implementation. They judge both the Act and the FSA to have been the products of an ideological preference for a deregulated food market. A market in which rivalry between major food companies is regarded as sufficient to ensure that consumers are well (and safely) served. As consumers were rarely, if ever, asked directly what they wanted and government simply assumed that the public would be well served by large retailers and by competition in international 63

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Food, risk and politics agricultural markets, Schofield and Shaoul show little hesitation in concluding that producer interests are constantly privileged over those of consumers. The alternative view, that the revision of food safety law and the creation of a Food Standards Agency, with its obligation to protect the public health, strengthened the ability of public policymakers and food safety regulators to put consumer interests first is, nevertheless, appealing. On the face of it, an independent Food Standards Agency – with responsibility for overseeing and reporting on the operation of food safety legislation and the work of a national inspectorate, charged with enforcing meat hygiene regulations – appears to be a substantial advance on institutional arrangements that did not distinguish between the interests of consumers and producers. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), which had been widely regarded as simply papering over a fundamental conflict of interest between consumers and food producers, no longer had to straddle and simultaneously represent producer and consumer interests. The new institutional geometry, with MAFF on the one side and the Food Standards Agency on the other, representing consumers, was quite widely interpreted as evidence that the Government was determined to ensure that agricultural policy and food industry sponsorship would no longer be confused with the representation of the public interest. However, as they were preparing to publish their research, Schofield and Shaoul made a particular point of drawing attention to official statistics on the incidence of E. coli infections. The statistics showed a rise ‘from zero [infections] in 1980 to more than 1,000 in 1997’ (2000: 532). They concluded that there was good reason to believe that the rise was attributable to a weakening of the regulatory regime that was supposed to ensure compliance with food safety standards, most particularly in Britain’s slaughterhouses, and protect the general public. While the Pennington report might, Schofield and Shaoul implied, have helped to raise public awareness of medical and scientific issues to do with E. coli O157 it had not done much to modify the impact of changes in the food industry on food safety or, and more importantly, the approach to risk regulation in public policy that had come to regard compliance with food safety legislation as largely unproblematic in the contemporary food economy. Taking the broader, sceptical and fully informed view Those who doubt that food safety legislation is self-enforcing should pay particularly close attention, in Schofield and Shaoul’s view, to changes in the regulatory framework governing the behaviour of the food industry, which had taken place since the late 1970s. The changes they identify include the ­introduction of compliance cost assessment, and a move away from stringent and direct 64

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science enforcement of regulations and an increasing emphasis on inspectors and regulators working collaboratively with the food industry to achieve the goals of regulation. Both these changes make it easier for public officials to accommodate and adapt to the commercial interests of the biggest companies in the food industry. Schofield and Shaoul also express doubts about the acceptance of the notion of ‘due diligence’ as a legal standard for determining whether sufficient care had been taken by food companies to meet regulatory requirements. Adopting a much less activist approach to regulatory actions was something that fitted in very well with the outlook of ministers who favoured deregulation and expected to save public funds by making enforcement agencies do more with less. Schofield and Shaoul concluded that the funding of Britain’s food safety regulators had become increasingly detached from the work that they need to do. While the food industry had been rapidly developing new products and had grown considerably in economic importance, public regulators had had to adapt to increasingly severe budget constraints. James and the constraints fashioning a new food safety regime In 1997, on the eve of forming a new government, the Labour Party’s plans for food safety regulation had been formulated with the assistance of Philip James (1997). James failed, in Schofield and Shaoul’s view, to take account of a multitude of developments in agriculture that increased rather than reduced the need for regulatory actions. What is more, they believe his report lacked an empirical base for making detailed and properly informed recommendations about how to tackle public health problems arising from the most important sources of contamination in the food chain. James, in summary, concentrated the new Labour government’s attention on institutional change rather than on the mechanics or the specialist resources required to police food safety. There was a failure to acknowledge or meet the substantial cost associated with devising an effective food safety regime. What this meant, according to Schofield and Shaoul, was that the regulatory apparatus that remained after the institutional changes recommended by James had been adopted simply was not fit for purpose. Regulatory systems, enforcement procedures, funding and specialist staff were all ill-matched to a food industry that had been profoundly altered by new technologies, international trade and considerable cost pressures. Judgements about the reform path chosen for food safety systems in the UK What happened to food safety, as parts of the meat processing industry adapted to cost pressures, is presented by Schofield and Shaoul as an instructive 65

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Food, risk and politics ­ icrocosm of the changes affecting the whole food industry. Changes which m they believe have adversely affected and are likely to go on adversely affecting the ability of regulators to keep food safe. In the case of the meat industry the difficulties faced by hygiene inspectors, in controlling the risk of food-borne E. coli O157 infections, have multiplied. By the late 1990s more than half of retail meat sales took place in supermarkets owned by Britain’s largest retailers. A small number of fast food outlets also enjoyed significant monopsony power, most notably McDonald’s. Meat suppliers had to deal with a few powerful buyers; the survival of their businesses depending on retaining those buyers. Livestock prices, influenced by the EU’s agricultural policies, which were the subject of intense negotiations between member states, helped to keep meat processors’ prices high. Caught between a heavily regulated livestock market and a few exceptionally powerful retail buyers of their products, meat processors sought to make savings in the charges levied by abattoirs for the slaughter of the animals their businesses needed to operate. Abattoirs had little or no ability to resist the pressure to cut their costs and were themselves dependent on services supplied by renderers. Rendering, which processes the animal waste that remains after slaughter, fulfils an indispensable function to the food industry. Without the services of renderers the accumulation of animal waste would quickly bring about the closure of abattoirs, which are obliged to get animal waste removed from their premises within 48 hours of slaughter in order to continue in operation. The economic pressures on abattoirs made it increasingly difficult for them to operate profitably and increased the likelihood that health and safety regulations would be circumvented and that practices would be adopted in slaughter houses that increased the risk of contaminated meat entering the food chain. This was at the same time that abattoirs were engaged in cost cutting and almost certainly cutting corners. Schofield and Shaoul claim that the food inspection regime responsible for overseeing and ensuring the safe operation of abattoirs was itself being undermined by changes in food safety law, reduced funding for regulation and inspection, and changes in the composition of the workforce employed by regulators and the abattoirs they were called upon to regulate. The changes in the economics of animal slaughter, the workforce employed in British abattoirs and in the regulatory regime tasked with ensuring that abattoirs carry out their work proficiently and safely have all been reflected in a heightened risk of E. coli-contaminated food entering the food chain. Some examples of the evidence that Schofield and Shaoul collected serve to drive home the principal claim that they make: any assessment of food safety regulatory regimes and food-related risks should consider not only what it is that inspectors are legally empowered to do but, additionally, what they have 66

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science the capacity to do and what they actually end up doing. While claims were being made that changes to food safety law and the organisation of the meat inspection system in Britain were improving public safety, Schofield and Shaoul set out to show that workloads and the circumstances in which inspectors were actually trying to do their job were making their main tasks more difficult. Despite the establishment of a Meat Hygiene Service (MHS) in 1995, replacing a local-authority-based system of inspection, deficiencies in training and in the numbers of inspectors raised serious questions about the capacity of the new national service to prevent contaminated meat products entering the food chain. At the time of its establishment, the MHS acknowledged that although the law required meat inspectors to be on site when slaughtering was taking place, it had only 700 inspectors to cover 1,800 meat operators. When the General Secretary of the Association of Meat Inspectors wrote to the MHS, in January 1997, to explain why his members had come to the conclusion that: ‘far from improving, standards of hygiene are steadily decreasing’, and to point out that his members were particularly concerned about ‘faecal contamination of beef ’, his criticisms were simply buried by the MHS. It appears that even though equipment existed which would have enabled MHS inspectors to detect E. coli O157 in the course of their work in abattoirs, and have provided them with an immediate total bacterial count, such tests were not carried out ‘because that would [have required] additional funding for the MHS and additional charges to the meat operators’. (Schofield and Shaoul, 2003: 546) The evidence that Schofield and Shaoul carefully assembled led them to conclude that during the same period that the British food industry became much more important to the national economy: evidence show[ed] poor hygiene conditions, declining levels of food inspections at the abattoirs, rising levels of contamination in both meat and other food products, declining prosecutions, fewer resources from the enforcement agencies, and no publicly available annual report and analysis of the food safety regime. (550)

The evidence also appeared to show that the ability of government to inform the public about how its food safety regime was working was severely compromised and that a lack of information undermined the public’s ability to hold the food industry to account and to make informed judgements about food safety regulation: The lack of reported and direct evidence linking visits and inspections to problems encountered means that it is impossible for the public to monitor accurately the incidence of the problems, demand corrective action or even make an effective and informed input into public policy. It is only one example of the secrecy which surrounds the operation of the food industry. In other words, none of the basic mechanisms of the effective implementation, enforcement and accountability of the food

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Food, risk and politics safety regime were in place. Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising that food safety problems have escalated. (550)

Regulation, risk and politics – a bigger picture? Hugh Pennington’s account of disaster science and of his personal role in drawing and communicating the public lessons from the Wishaw E. coli O157 outbreak is a classic of its kind. His straightforward explanations of what went wrong in Wishaw and how public policy can be designed to combat failures might be interpreted as a claim that a strong and well-directed inquiry can get to the truth and do so quickly and at an acceptable cost. To give one of Britain’s leading bacteriologists credit, he never suggests that such a naive view of the interaction between disaster science and public risk regulation can be taken at face value. While the politicians who commission inquiries might want to trumpet them for their own reasons and assert that they can redirect the effort of risk regulators, the ability of any inquiry, on its own, to serve as a catalyst for radical change in a risk regulation regime must be suspect. The reasons for that are forcefully expressed in Schofield and Shaoul’s account of risk regulation in a market society, where the capacity to observe, record, educate and change behaviour is far more dependent upon the adequacy and fitness of regulatory machinery than it is on any single communication of disaster science and its implications for regulatory activity. Greg Palast, Jerrold Oppenheim and Theo MacGregor in their book, Democracy and Regulation (2003), set out to explore how the public might better govern what they label essential services. Although their study was concerned primarily with the regulation of major utilities many of the conclusions they reached apply to the regulation of food-related risks in liberal democracies. Palast and his colleagues begin by asking why, in the years before their study was published, electricity prices were higher and telephone calls so much more expensive in Britain and Europe than they were in the USA. Apart from California, where they observed price regulation had been temporarily replaced by a market in electricity, they came to a conclusion that will surprise many enthusiastic marketeers: low-cost, high-quality service rests on simple, two-part formula we call Democratic Regulation: (1) Complete open public access to information; and, (2) Full public participation in setting prices and standards of service. (2003: 1)

Two general propositions follow, propositions that students of risk politics and food safety should carefully consider: first, determined and well-resourced regulation can powerfully shape markets if there is a genuine political will to make 68

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Pennington, E. coli and disaster science regulation work and, secondly, unless regulatory processes are transparent and continuously accountable they are unlikely to work to deliver the results that the public want. Public risk regulators – and that includes food safety inspectors and regulators – must begin by recognising that however sophisticated the disaster science on which they are able to draw, the resources of consumers and producers in market societies are profoundly unequal and the inequality is only likely to be remedied if the public has the active assistance of the state in observing and recording the activities of the private and public organisations that engage in society’s riskiest activities.

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4 BSE and vCJD – still crazy after all these years

Introduction In March 1996, the then Conservative Secretary of State for Health, Stephen Dorrell, told the House of Commons that there was probably a link between Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) – ‘mad cow disease’ – and a new variant of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD). Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease was known to be a fatal degenerative brain disease in humans. What shocked the House of Commons and attracted international (not just national) media coverage was not simply that Mr Dorrell’s statement publicly acknowledged a new form of CJD as being the probable cause of death of eight Britons, with an average age of twenty-seven (people who had previously been regarded as most unlikely candidates for CJD), but that the disease agent that had been implicated in their deaths was a disease agent which had been represented to the British public as no real threat to their health and the cause of a cattle disease that had been unknown before the mid-1980s. One minister, John Gummer, had just six years earlier, in May 1990, sought to reassure the British meat-eating public, alarmed by the sight of cattle unable to stand and being led away to slaughter, that BSE was not a threat to them, by getting his four-year-old daughter, Cordelia, to eat a beefburger in front of television cameras at an agricultural fair. Many members of the British public were also aware that it was not just ministers who had sought to soothe and reassure them by describing any possibility of BSE being transmitted from cattle to humans as remote. The UK’s most senior health officials, Sir Donald Acheson and his successor, Sir Kenneth Calman, Chief Medical Officers at the Department of Health (DoH), had tried to do the same thing, in what were represented at the time as authoritative statements about the infinitesimal risk that BSE posed to the meat-eating public. Government health experts, professionals who were believed to be above party politics and government spin, were seen to have reinforced ministerial 70

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BSE and vCJD messages that it was safe to eat beef. Any UK resident who had accepted their reassurances that BSE did not pose a significant threat to human health and had continued to eat beef, were now being told, by the Secretary of State for Health, that government’s confidence that BSE could not cross the species barrier from cattle to humans had been misplaced. British citizens found they had good grounds for doubting not only government ministers but the most highly qualified public health officials advising their government; and the numbers who might legitimately feel aggrieved and believe that they had been misled ran into tens of millions. Alarm at what Mr Dorrell had had to say was not confined to Britain. British beef was widely consumed outside of Britain. It was exported around the world and most particularly to Britain’s trading partners in the European Union. If the vast majority of Britons were at risk of developing vCJD then large numbers of EU citizens, who had also been exposed to that risk through the consumption of British beef, had good reason to believe that they were equally vulnerable. In the immediate aftermath of Mr Dorrell’s statement the European Union’s Standing Veterinary Committee imposed a ban on the export of British beef products to the rest of the world. The British government itself announced that cattle over thirty months old would be slaughtered as part of a precautionary strategy intended to ensure that potentially infected beef did not enter the food chain. It was a strategy that had little scientific justification but it was thought by ministers to offer reassurance to the public. The European ban and the British government’s slaughter programme did little to reduce public anxiety or to reduce the anger of Britain’s European trading partners. One reason for this was that it became increasingly widely known that veterinary authorities in Britain, and more generally throughout the European Union, had failed to act decisively to deal with one of the main means by which the agent causing BSE was thought to have been spread. Meat and bone-meal (MBM) fed to farm animals had been an early suspect in the search for a vector by which BSE had moved from one cattle herd to another. Britain had adopted a practice, in the early 1980s, of feeding to ruminants MBM produced from the carcasses of other ruminants such as sheep. Despite this, controls on MBM were introduced slowly and applied haphazardly. Measures taken in Britain and elsewhere had not prevented potentially contaminated animal feed from being exported to continental Europe and around the world. By the spring of 1996 there were plenty of regrets, at the very highest levels in British government, and public trust in government and relations between the British government and the governments of other EU member states had been dealt a severe blow. During the long saga of BSE and vCJD it is the destruction of trust in government that has become one of the most important and hotly debated matters amongst attentive students of risk and food politics. 71

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Food, risk and politics The loss of trust in public authorities that followed Dorrell’s statement, its consequences for risk politics generally and food safety in particular and the difficulties of recreating public trust and confidence are amongst the principal themes of this chapter. A very strange (and unpredictable) disease It simply isn’t possible to exaggerate the strangeness of BSE or the scale of the uncertainties that first surrounded and continue to surround both it and vCJD. Hugh Pennington, whose inquiry into the Wishaw E. coli O157 outbreak in Scotland in 1996 has already been discussed, compared BSE and CJD with E. coli. In the case of E. coli there was, he wrote: ‘a deep scientific understanding of the bacterium [to give us a] … solid foundation on which to remedy [any] ignorance about its behaviour and nature’ (2003: 114). BSE, CJD and vCJD were, by comparison, little understood and the lack of scientific knowledge about them meant that uncertainties about their origins, transmission and pathogenicity and about human vulnerability to encephalopathy could not be dispelled by experts, however eminent. Science continues to wrestle with BSE and vCJD, even though understanding of what has now been generally accepted as the disease agent, a malformed protein known as a prion, has grown substantially. What – it may be asked – can anyone expect of risk managers when ignorance and uncertainty abound? How are risk managers to settle on veterinary and public health strategies to counter an almost entirely speculative human disease risk arising from a previously unknown animal disease? What should be done to limit the harm that previously unsuspected zoonoses might (or might not) do? What if anything do regulators and risk managers have to go on? It would be misleading to suggest that encephalopathies were unknown in the mid-1980s, when the Veterinary Laboratory Service (VLS) first became aware of what was later labelled BSE. It would certainly not be true to suggest that animal encephalopathies were unknown. Scrapie, which can be thought of as the ovine counterpart to BSE, was first recorded in sheep as long ago as 1732. It was not considered a threat to human health and it was assumed that there was a species barrier that prevented humans consuming lamb from being damaged by whatever it was that was responsible for scrapie. However, one early theory, aimed at explaining the sudden appearance of BSE was based on the idea that scrapie-infected MBM had been fed to cattle and led to BSE. An ovine encephalopathy had become a bovine one because of the growing practice of feeding the ground-up remains of ruminants to other ruminants. It was thought possible that changes in the process of producing MBM from animal 72

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BSE and vCJD remains had allowed an infective agent to survive which had previously been destroyed. As understanding of prion disease has grown the ability of prions to survive all standard methods of disinfection has called this particular hypothesis into question. Other possibilities were also canvassed, including a spontaneous change in the brain of a single cow, the altered protein entering the animal food chain and becoming the source of a general infection. The disease pathology and chain of causation that this seemed to imply was regarded as improbable but has attracted more support as other theories have fallen by the wayside. The very notion that cattle had been infected by something in the process of developing BSE pointed to a virus or bacterium, an organism that was capable of reproducing itself. But nothing found in animal feed squared with established notions about a disease agent or the spread of an infectious disease. The idea, first proposed by an internationally renowned scientist and Nobel Prize winner, Stanley Prusiner, in the early 1980s, that a misshapen protein in the brain could cause normal proteins to change their shape and result in the destruction of normal brain tissue was difficult to accept. Pennington borrows and adapts a story about a Rabbi to help explain this approach. The Rabbi, who had been asked to adjudicate between the proponents of rival theories, had a task that seemed to match that of a scientist choosing rival theories accounting for BSE and vCJD. The peculiarities of Prusiner’s disease agent were so great that the scientific community had difficulty in accepting it as such. Pennington’s version of the story goes as follows: Two men asked a rabbi to settle their dispute. After listening to the first man’s presentation the rabbi announced, ‘I find that you are right’. The second man, dismayed, protested, ‘but rabbi, you haven’t heard my side yet’, and went on to present his case. The rabbi said, ‘now that I’ve heard you, I find you are also right.’ Then the rabbi’s assistant interjected ‘but rabbi, they can’t both be right’, to which the rabbi responded, ‘you are right, too’. (2003: 142)

Stanley Prusiner coined the term prion in a scientific paper published in 1982. He wrote: In place of such terms as ‘unconventional virus’ or ‘unusual slow virus-like agent’ the term prion (pronounced pree-on) is suggested. Prions are small proteinaceous infectious particles which are resistant to inactivation by most procedures that modify nucleic acids. The term ‘prion’ underscores the requirement of a protein for infection; current knowledge does not allow exclusion of a small nucleic acid within the interior of the particle. (Pennington, 2003: 137)

In recent times New Scientist (NS, 2007b: 10) has reported on research by Rona Barron at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh (undertaken in collaboration with the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California) which has created 73

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Food, risk and politics yet more doubt. The results of the research into encephalopathies and prion infectivity have been interpreted as showing that: [malrformed prions are] probably the pathological consequence of infection rather than the infectious agent itself

Laura Manuelidis, of Yale Medical School, who has advanced the view that abnormal prions are the effect rather than the cause of encephalopathies, has suggested that virus-like particles may be responsible for diseases such as BSE (NS, 2007b). It is hard to avoid the impression that, if the best informed scientists still find it difficult to agree amongst themselves about encephalopathies, continue to be surprised at the results of prion research and accept that the investigation of encephalopathies stretches current knowledge and scientific methodology up to and beyond its limits, firm knowledge about the cause, transmission and treatment of encephalopathies will probably remain elusive for some time to come. The uncertainties of science have been paralleled by uncertainties and numerous false steps amongst policy makers and their advisers. The uncertainties of BSE and most particularly vCJD have also, not unsurprisingly, extended to likely patterns of spread and projections of the numbers of people thought likely to develop vCJD. Britain’s first confirmed case of BSE has been traced back to a farm in Sussex, where cow 133 was reported to have developed head tremors, by a veterinarian who visited the farm in December 1984. Public confirmation that a new disease in cattle had been found came in an article in The Veterinary Record published almost three years later, in October 1987. MAFF had shown considerable reluctance in allowing the veterinary findings to be placed in the public domain. The following year BSE became a notifiable disease and the government established a working party to investigate BSE shortly before introducing a ban on feeding the remains of ruminants to ruminants in July 1988. The working party, under the leadership of Sir Richard Southwood, despite the great uncertainties that existed about the causes and transmissibility of BSE, judged that BSE was unlikely to pose a threat to humans. It did advise the government to establish an expert committee to advise it about research into spongiform encephalopathies, which led to the establishment of the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Commitee (SEAC). Fortunately the Southwood assessment did not prevent the government from introducing a ban on specified bovine offal (SBO) which has, with the advantage of hindsight, been characterised as the single most important decision taken by government in attempting to control the entry of BSE into the food chain. Although it was never rigorously enforced – and it was always problematic for abattoirs to operate the ban – it did result in the removal of large amounts of the spinal material 74

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BSE and vCJD that was later confirmed to harbour the malformed proteins blamed for the spread of the disease amongst cattle and to the human population. The possibility that Southwood might have been mistaken was supported by research findings published early in 1990 which demonstrated that BSE could be transmitted from cow to cow by injection and acquired by mice orally. In the same year a Siamese cat was found to have a BSE-like disease, sending a clear signal that no one could any longer be confident that there was an impenetrable species barrier to the spread of encephalopathies acquired from BSE-infected material. Nevertheless, the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health claimed, within a few days of news about the diseased cat, that beef was safe to eat; a view that received support from SEAC in subsequent years when it declared that existing safeguards, including the SBO, which was designed to keep bovine offal out of human food, should be sufficient to protect human health. A killer disease? The first death from BSE is thought to have occurred in May 1995. Later that same year MAFF informed SEAC that there were breaches of the SBO ban and the infected tissue was almost certainly continuing to enter the human food chain. Within a month MAFF had announced a ban on mechanically recovered meat (MRM), which included material dislodged from the spinal columns of cattle, being used in human food. In late March 1996 SEAC came to the conclusion that BSE in cows and reports of CJD deaths in an agegroup not normally affected by the disease almost certainly implicated BSE in a new human encephalopathy. The political and economic ramifications of this conclusion were substantial and continue to shape risk politics and public-policy makers’ approach to virtually all food safety issues. At the end of March 1996 the European Union ban on British beef imports was imposed and a few days later cattle over thirty months old were banned from the food chain. A little over a year later studies in mice provided confirmation that BSE and vCJD were probably linked and, following a change of government, Tony Blair’s first administration established the BSE enquiry headed by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers. Lord Phillips, working with two others, presented the BSE inquiry report to the House of Commons in October 2000. The report consisted of sixteen volumes and the evidence and papers prepared for it had threatened, at one point, the structural integrity of the building in which it had been based. Almost all of the material it considered along with its detailed report can be accessed online. 75

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Food, risk and politics BSE – fatalities and fallout The fallout from BSE has been considerable and it continues to the present day. The spread of BSE throughout the European Union was signalled by the discovery of BSE in Germany and Spain in November 2000. The occurrence of vCJD outside of Europe was confirmed when two Thais were reported to have vCJD in Feburary 2000. Japan reported a case of BSE in a native-born cow in September 2002 and the first confirmed case of vCJD in North America was confirmed in August 2002. Although the need for detailed research into BSE had been identified by the Southwood Working Party – a recommendation reinforced by a consultative committee led by Dr Robert Tyrrell – government funded research into the origins and pathology of BSE left much to be desired. For example, a lengthy study to establish whether BSE had been transmitted from cattle to sheep failed to produce useful findings because scientists conducting the study were found to have been testing cattle rather than sheep brain tissue. When Stephen Dorrell had made his announcement in the House of Commons, in March 1996, scientifically informed estimates of the numbers of likely human victims of vCJD were hard to come by. By November the following year, James Ironside of the CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh was quoted by the Independent newspaper as saying ‘It looks as though the total number of cases over the whole course of the disease will be in the hundreds rather than the thousands’ (Independent, 1996). Dr. Ironside’s expert assessment contrasted sharply with the one given by Professor Adrian Smith reported in a Lancet editorial (Lancet, 1996) in which he reflected the very great uncertainty that remained about vCJD. Professor Smith explained that he was unable to say with any confidence whether there would be no more cases or millions of new cases of vCJD. Uncertainties about the eventual toll from vCJD still remain. At the beginning of 2008, the CJD surveillance unit in Edinburgh has recorded 163 certain and probable deaths attributable to vCJD (and another three cases where sufferers remained alive). It is considered possible, because of gaps in scientific knowledge about the course of the disease, that millions of people could be infected but simply not exhibiting symptoms. It is even conceivable that many of those who carry the malformed prion, thought to be the cause of vCJD, may die from unrelated causes before any symptoms of vCJD are manifested. In May 2006, the New Scientist reported on work undertaken by James Ironside that raised the possibility that ‘a whole new section of the population [might] be at risk of developing the human form of mad cow disease’. This possibility had arisen ‘following the discovery of the agent responsible for vCJD in the appendixes of two people who have a different genetic make-up from all other known victims of the disease’. (NS, 2006b). 76

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BSE and vCJD BSE – a playable or unplayable hand? Robert Maxwell’s short account of the politics and science of BSE, written and published in 1997, poses the question: ‘Was BSE an unplayable hand?’ He does not waste space in giving an answer to his own question and his answer is one that most students of risk and food politics are likely to endorse: ‘Governments can be desperately unlucky in the cards that they are dealt, [but] they cannot regard any hand as unplayable’ (Maxwell, 1997: 2–3). Managing risk and coping with uncertainty, in the light of scientific knowledge, however limited, by formulating and implementing policies that are the best that can be devised and the most responsive to the politics of the time is the inescapable responsibility of those who find themselves in government. They must either get on or get out. Those who study and analyse the hand and the way in which it was played also have a duty to undertake their task without restraint. Maxwell is one of a growing number of academics and policy analysts who have sought to do so. He is joined in his examination of the risk analysis, communication and management of British governments faced with the BSE and vCJD crisis and its sequel, by Richard Packer and Patrick van Zwanenberg and Erik Millstone. Their reflections on the politics of risk and food have emerged over a much longer period and been able to take account of the mammoth Phillips Inquiry report. Government plays its hand, and how well does it play? Of all the food scares, scandals and crises that shaped British politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century more has been written about BSE and vCJD than any other. The desire to learn and apply lessons flowing from multiple crises over the conduct of risk science, risk communication and risk management, following the emergence of BSE and vCJD, has been intense. This undoubtedly reflects a frequently unspoken hypothesis – evident in much of political life and in political commentary – that the most extreme events often serve as a particularly good testing ground for individual policy makers and for the policy making machinery available to them. What works in particularly testing times, it can safely be assumed, must be capable of fulfilling the reasonable expectations of the public and of those they elect to govern society at all other times. Structures that have been built to withstand a hurricane and been shown to survive the storm will remain serviceable at all other times. However, it is possible that an approach to public-policy-making, and risk management in particular, which focuses on the extraordinary, may overlook or relegate, in the public and political imagination at least, the importance of doing what is ­routine and 77

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Food, risk and politics ordinary confidently and competently most of the rest of the time. A focus on and preference for relying on dramatic events – even welcoming them as an opportunity to draw out and apply lessons in risk management – may misdirect both the attention of policy makers and the resources that they have available to them. It is even possible that the shape of risk politics may be profoundly affected by the extent to which respites from the dramas of crisis management are used to identify and focus on exceptional hazards and anticipate extreme dangers that detract from the effort to build systems and a civil society in which the reduction of everyday risks and the anticipation of circumstances that presage a greater crisis are regarded as the paramount goal of responsible government. Many of the ‘tentative lessons’ that Robert Maxwell draws from the political and policy-making crises he observed in the wake of Stephen Dorrell’s announcements about BSE and vCJD in March 1996, recognise the importance of getting things right in ordinary times and developing the capacity in government to minimise the risks that unexpected events may give rise to, and the kinds of public alarm and dramatic shifts in public opinion that add to the difficulties of managing risk in the face of exceptional events. One of the points that Maxwell makes is that it may be more productive, in seeking to draw lessons and understand what has happened in the aftermath of some great crisis, to avoid a concentration on culpability and the attribution of blame. In any event, he concludes, none of those involved in giving advice or making and executing public policy can be described simply as the ‘good guys’ or the ‘bad guys’ (1997: 51). Four horses of policy analysis Maxwell concentrates on four issues concerning food policy and food safety in the wake of Dorrell’s announcement: • How should different governmental responsibilities be divided between the great departments of state; particularly responsibilities for overseeing and making policy for agricultural production and for the food industry, and for representing and protecting the interests of consumers? • What needs to be done to manage and improve the relationship between science, policy and politics (experts, officials and ministers and the fora in which food issues of all kinds, including food safety, are publicly debated) in order to serve the public interest, however that may be defined? • How desirable and how practicable is it to manage and coordinate relations between governments and international organisations and domestic risk management better? • What scope is there for making changes in farming and food policy that would

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BSE and vCJD better serve the British public in future and reduce the likelihood that other ministers would have such difficult announcements to make? (51)

Maxwell’s conclusion and advice seemed clear and may now seem passé: By embedding food safety in MAFF [a single department of state] … the pragmatic balancing of different interests (consumer safety; producer profitability; the national economy, public expenditure and the balance of payments) [was bound to happen] behind closed doors, deep in the recesses of the Ministry. (54)

A division of labour and a separation of responsibilities is a necessary, though it may not be a sufficient, condition for a proper exercise by government of multiple and conflicting responsibilities. The greater the likelihood that responsibilities conflict, the more important it is, in a liberal democracy, to create institutional arrangements that ensure that different interests will be clearly and strongly articulated. That is almost always better done in a way that minimises the risk of the general public coming to believe that it has been excluded for fear that it will behave irrationally or is judged incapable of understanding the principal issues that directly concern its welfare. Maxwell did not find fault with the relationship between scientific experts and senior policymakers. He quotes, with obvious approval, what he had been told by a key scientific government adviser in a private conversation: The Cabinet truly was motivated to understand. We were brought under no pressure to manipulate anything and, since the crisis broke, they have published everything that we have said. (55)

There is, however, another problem with the relationship between science, policy and politics that has been particularly difficult to address in the course of the BSE/vCJD crises. Maxwell refers to it as the ‘dominance of orthodoxy within science’ (56). The strangeness of BSE meant that it was particularly difficult for senior figures in the scientific establishment, however well-meaning, to give clear advice and at the same time acknowledge publicly and privately the limitations in their knowledge and the implications that this had for public policy, and for risk communication with the general public. The ‘dominance of orthodoxy within science’ had another very important and troubling implication in the case of BSE/vCJD. One of the most important functions of scientific advisers, especially in cases where there is great uncertainty, is to help establish research priorities and guide public decision-making about the interpretation and presentation of research findings. Maxwell suggests that the relationship between science, policy and politics, particularly when the scientific basis for generating and reviewing existing policy is weak, needs to be one in which alternative hypotheses can be nurtured and a wide range of scientific disciplines engaged. 79

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Food, risk and politics This does not mean, as he is at pains to point out, that every passing hare is pursued but it does require a conscious acceptance of the need to infuse both science and policy-making, where there are great uncertainties, with a recognition that useful information may lie well outside the mainstream. There is also a need, and Maxwell recognises this, to come clean with the public about the limitations of scientific knowledge and the importance of research where there are major gaps in knowledge. It is important to explain both how and why the strengths of the scientific method lie in considering and evaluating rival hypotheses. The desire, indeed the requirement, that policymakers often have for certainty is almost certainly inimical to the honest communication of scientific uncertainty. Maxwell considered that politicians who are able to acknowledge uncertainty may benefit in terms of their relations, on the one hand, with the general public and, on the other, in their relations with expert advisers. This is a view that very few politicians and public-policy ­makers appear to share. Maxwell was most perturbed about the handling of what he refers to as the ‘European dimension’ of BSE/vCJD. British ministers appeared to be behaving petulantly and even irrationally, at times, on the European stage. They gave the appearance, in the course of a series of crises stemming from the announcement that BSE and vCJD were linked, that many of the things that they did internationally were done to simply assuage domestic opinion and respond to immediate domestic political considerations. The price that was paid, in terms of goodwill and the impairment of arrangements for shared policy-making, undoubtedly made it much more difficult to develop a common approach to the assessment, communication and management of risk; something that none of the political leaders in Union member states disputed was desirable, and most regarded as vital given the scale and importance of international agricultural trade. There can be little doubt that the food economies of EU member states have become more interdependent and that it makes increasing good sense to reflect that in the food safety laws and regulatory arrangements throughout the Union. Indeed, in the years since Maxwell completed his Unplayable Hand member states have been more or less reconciled to the need for the consistent and impartial application of common food safety rules; ways of doing things that facilitate the management of risk within the single market, and which accord with the obligations that EU member states accept are part of their membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Codex Alimentarius. The Codex was established by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1963. The readiness with which national political leaders, not just those in Britain, had been willing to play their national cards in disputes about food and food safety policy, has 80

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BSE and vCJD been recognised as counterproductive and short-sighted. Finding ways to communicate the safety benefits as well as the economic importance of common food standards, guidelines and codes is one very important way of conveying to the general public the desirability and utility of subscribing to internationally recognised and agreed fair and safe food trade practices. Reducing risk and increasing safety – at a price Perhaps the most unpalatable observations that Maxwell has to make concern general reforms of farming and food policy and their implications for the price of food. Higher safety standards and a reduction in food-related risks do not/will not come cheap. The expectation that food will be plentiful as well as cheap has become entrenched during a period of remarkable economic growth and retail expansion. In Britain, even more than in the countries of its continental neighbours, consumers have been encouraged to think that there is no necessary conflict between choice, quality and low food prices. And, as Maxwell puts it, despite the regular arrival of food scares and food scandals in newspapers and on television screens, consumers are encouraged to accept uncritically that almost anything that they can buy will be safe. But, he suggests, and he is not alone in this, consumers are likely to pay a high price for the food economy that has been created. Part of that price is paid in terms of food that is less safe than it could and certainly ought to be. The outward evidence of poor food safety, discussed in the case study chapters of this book, and in food scares that are not discussed here, such as the alarm over listeria in soft cheese (1990), toxins in apple juice (1993) and phthalates in baby food (1996), will be well known to most readers. Evidence that is less accessible is known to inspectors and regulators, right across food industries: unsatisfactory and dangerous practices in abattoirs, discussed in Chapter 3; shortcomings in the storage of food including lacunae in food safety regulations governing the temperatures at which foods can be stored; and forms of intensive rearing that would put many people off their food if they knew about them and, even more, if they witnessed them first-hand. Maxwell points to regulatory practices and systems which he believes are inadequate and to: a culture … where not being caught by some tiresome official is the standard, rather than full compliance with regulations, the reasons for which are understood and accepted. (68)

There is considerable scope for the much more risk-averse approach to food safety that he advocates but it will only come at a substantial price (which a growing minority of consumers are prepared to pay) and if public-policy mak81

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Food, risk and politics ers and consumers generally accept that the cost of food must rise in order to fund higher-quality regulation, increased inspection and more sustainable forms of production. It is indisputable that the higher incomes necessary to provide for improved safety in abattoirs and some parts of the food processing industries will only be affordable if consumers accept the price increases upon which they are contingent. It is a message about the relationship between public policy, public safety and consumer prices that many still find it hard to stomach. Other assessments of how the hand was played Maxwell’s Unplayable Hand? has been joined by two other assessments of the politics of risk and of the BSE affair. One of them, and the first I am going to consider here, is set out in a book on The Politics of BSE (2006) written by the former Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, who took up his post in 1993 and retired from the ministry in 2000. Sir Richard Packer writes that he ‘participated in many of the more important discussions and incidents which occurred when BSE was a major issue’ (5). Sir Richard was exceptionally well qualified as the Permanent Secretary at MAFF; he had trained as a scientist, had experience of agricultural and fishing policies in the European Union before he became the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry and, when he was appointed, was the youngest Permanent Secretary to be appointed to the post. Sir Richard’s account of the BSE crises and of government’s response to them is strikingly different from most other accounts, academic and popular. He rejects the kinds of criticisms found in books such as Don’t Worry: It’s Safe to Eat by Andrew Rowell, who labels MAFF the ‘Ministry of Truth’, in what he clearly believes is the sure and certain knowledge that MAFF was anything but (2003a: 23). Sir Richard, however, had one of the best views in town during the most turbulent period in British agricultural and food policy-making and, in a detailed and lengthy exposition, based on unrivalled access to papers, persons and events, his personal recollections of the policy-making process at the heart of British government leads him to conclude that the British public have been fed a distorted and ill-informed version of events. Typical of the kind of journalism which Sir Richard believes left otherwise reasonably well-informed Britons under the impression that the politics of BSE was deeply disreputable was a piece in the Observer. It opened with language meant to sum up the popular view of officials and ministers responsible for agricultural and public health policy by referring to: ‘[a] secretive civil ­service’, 82

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BSE and vCJD ‘mendacious politicians’, ‘greedy farmers’, ‘complacency’, ‘incompetence’, ‘buck-­passing’ and ‘cover-ups’. As Sir Richard notes in the opening pages of his masterly account of the politics of BSE, all these words appeared in an article written in November 1998 by one of the UK’s leading political journalists, Andrew Rawnsley. Richard Packer makes an impressive witness; he is, for the most part, firm in his own views and persuasive in putting the government’s defence (at least as long as and in so far as ministers took his advice). Sir Richard rejects Rawnsley’s conclusions about BSE as well as his terminology. BSE, he insists, was ‘nobody’s fault … and nothing anybody could reasonably have been expected to do would have prevented it’. He is confident that because of the length of the incubation period of BSE a substantial epidemic was inevitable, regardless of the speed with which the government had acted once it became aware of the disease and its capacity to cause vCJD. It is, and there can be little dispute with this, ‘quite possible that all of those who have succumbed to vCJD were infected before controls [such as the SBO ban] were introduced’ (Packer, 2006: 245–246). And, Sir Richard is certain that there was no great failure of public policy, which was covered up. With a single exception he believes that public-policy makers were open with the public. That exception, which occurred before he became permanent Secretary at MAFF, relates to the way in which the Chief Veterinary Officer sought to control the flow of information about BSE in 1987. Sir Richard’s exoneration of MAFF and the government from charges that they failed to act reasonably, on the basis of the information that was available, is almost complete. He does accept that mistakes were made, most especially in not ensuring that there was a ban on MRM from animals’ spinal columns and in not enforcing the SBO ban adopted in 1990 more rigorously. However, many of the difficulties with enforcement were attributable to ‘irresponsible attitudes’ in slaughter houses and animal feed mills towards the ban and to a system of local authority inspection of abattoirs that he believes was simply unfit for purpose. Sir Richard’s judgements about the adequacy of risk communication with the general public are much less convincing than his judgements about risk management itself. The strength of the public reaction to the revelation that BSE was implicated in vCJD appears to have shocked him and he attributes it to features of BSE and vCJD ‘which the public inevitably found troubling’: (i) the dramatic way in which cattle infected with BSE lost control of their movements, and (ii) the horrible deaths of vCJD sufferers. Sir Richard goes on to identify three other factors which he believes exacerbated public feelings of horror and suspicion. One of those factors, he claims, is the strength of ‘the consumer movement’, which had become a well-entrenched and highly successful critic of government policy and parts of the food industry. 83

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Food, risk and politics The second was the way in which European Union politics became enmeshed in the BSE crises and helped stoke public anger and dissatisfaction with the politics in general and the management of food issues, most especially BSE, in particular. The third factor, in Sir Richard’s view, was the increasing unpopularity of the Conservative government in the mid-1990s, which meant that BSE became a particularly attractive stick with which to beat unpopular members of an unpopular government. In fact Sir Richard goes out of his way to praise the openness of Conservative politicians during the time that he was Permanent Secretary at MAFF and compares them favourably with their Labour successors, whom he also served at the end of the 1990s. It is not necessary to doubt Sir Richard’s sincerity in order to doubt his analysis. What he neglects is the impression that ministers and officials strove to give, particularly the most senior public-health officials advising the government, that there was nothing to worry about. It was an impression that they had no right to give as they could not possibly have known, as Sir Richard acknowledges, whether BSE was destined to be confined to cattle when, in the early 1990s they committed themselves to a policy of public reassurance – what Lord Phillips describes as a policy of sedation. The failure to fully acknowledge the great uncertainties associated with BSE and the determination to soothe the public should not be ignored; the pursuit of such a strategy was one of the most important decisions that ministers and officials made. What Lord Phillips labelled a policy of public sedation did a great disservice to the public and to British politics. It goes a long way to explaining the distrust that has subsequently characterised public attitudes to ministerial statements, particularly statements about food policy and public safety, in subsequent years. The reasons for public distrust of government and the importance of what is known as the asymmetry principle, for civil society and political life in liberal and democratic societies, will be discussed at the end of this chapter. It is appropriate, before turning to the asymmetry principle, to note Sir Richard’s penchant for dismissing public anger over BSE as little more than exasperation with a group of politicians who overstayed their welcome in office, and a growing and general dissatisfaction with politics that can be found in many modern democracies. His view is one that fails to acknowledge the significance of insights gained from the research of social psychologists, such as Paul Slovic, who have alerted the whole of the social science community to the fragility of public trust and the difficulties of restoring it once it has been lost. Much more consistent with the general view that is presented in this case study is the work of Patrick van Zwanenberg and Erik Millstone, authors of BSE: Risk, Science and Governance (2005). They conclude that:

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BSE and vCJD [The] BSE policy and the risk narratives disseminated by the British government, at least prior to March 1996, were … profoundly misleading and comprehensively flawed. Our account of the BSE saga shows, moreover, that MAFF’s policy agenda, and its consequent attempt to represent BSE solely as a veterinary problem, to reassure consumers that British beef was unproblematically safe, failed for both institutional and scientific reasons. (229)

What van Zwanenberg and Millstone assert is that the presentation of science cannot sensibly be separated from the political environment in which scientists are asked to give advice and are awarded (even rewarded) with funds to undertake research. They suggest that the boundaries between science and politics are much fuzzier than Sir Richard Packer is willing to admit. Van Zwanenberg and Millstone believe that senior officials and ministers had choices and that alternative ways of communicating and presenting the scientific uncertainties as well as the BSE science that was available could have been pursued if ministers had wanted to. It was, they suggest, the senior staff working at the CJD Surveillance Unit (in Edinburgh) whose challenge to what had become the (Whitehall) policy makers’ preferred view about BSE, finally undermined support, early in 1996, for the risk narrative adopted after receipt of the Southwood Working Party report in February 1989. While they (members of the CJD Surveillance Unit) were not in a position to prove that BSE was causally related to vCJD their suspicions were sufficiently strong, and they were sufficiently determined and independent of government, to advise ministers that BSE was likely to be a serious threat to human health. In BSE: Risk, Science, and Governance van Zwanenberg and Millstone make a case for separating expert advisers from policy makers in organisations with distinct lines of accountability, terms of reference and funding. They insist that the importance that they attach to such a separation between policy makers and expert advisers is not meant to signal doubts about the personal integrity of scientists, ministers or officials involved in public-policy making in areas such as food safety. Rather they believe that there are subtle yet powerful influences at work at the heart of government which tend to promote and reward shared viewpoints and the acceptance of common goals. While, as they put it, ‘diversity probably complicates the procedure by which closure is reached in policymaking … it can contribute to conferring scientific and democratic legitimacy on policies which would not otherwise attain such legitimacy’ (255). If there is great uncertainty or conflict amongst expert advisers, government ministers and officials they may be reluctant to share it with the public they serve. If they fail to do so they run the risk that they will face accusations that they ‘suppressed scientific information, arguments and doubts that the public have a right to be told about’. However, acknowledging that there are significant differences of view amongst its expert advisers risks attracting criticism on 85

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Food, risk and politics the grounds that the government is sending out mixed messages and is not really sure what to do. That is one reason why simple messages may be politically attractive and often appear expedient but, if such messages are likely to be contradicted or require major revision, a more complicated/sophisticated message, what van Zwanenberg and Millstone call ‘risk narrative’, may be preferable. More sophisticated risk narratives may reduce the risk of political leaders being thought to have lied or of being perceived as having been economical with the truth. Given the severe loss of public support that government ministers may suffer if they are thought to have deceived the public, and what psychological research has begun to reveal about trust-destroying and trust-enhancing events and actions, it may well be time for risk managers, including political leaders with a key role in policy making, to reject maxims of political communication that urge them to keep things simple and instead embrace the case for more sophisticated risk narratives. Asymmetry, risk and trust in a liberal democracy The interplay between public perceptions of risk and trust in democratic institutions and elected policy-makers is – or ought to be – a matter of special concern for students of risk politics and food safety. A good deal is now known, as a result of psychological research, about how trust is built up and how (and how easily) it is destroyed. The findings and applied social psychology of researchers, such as Paul Slovic, has helped to shine a powerful light on the politics of BSE and on public reactions to the behaviour, choices and statements of ministers and officials in response to the spread of BSE and the appearance of vCJD. Slovic begins a discussion (1999: 42–52) of risk, trust and democracy by observing that even though society – and he refers to his own, the United States – has generally become safer and healthier the population as a whole appears to have become more anxious about matters of personal safety and health. This trend, Slovic observes, towards growing risk awareness and increasing risk aversion, appears to be linked to another trend, a polarisation of opinions about the perception of risk itself. While mounting public anxiety about the risks of modern life attracts mockery – from knowledgeable and statistically literate commentators – such mockery from those who know better does not appear to be capable of dispelling public anxiety over what are widely perceived as growing risks. Something apart from intelligent and dispassionate analysis seems to be needed to do that. But what could be more straightforward than to communicate the real state of affairs by focusing on the pros rather than the cons of modern life, including increased affluence, greater longevity and a general reduction in the major risks affecting the population? If risk ­communication 86

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BSE and vCJD could be improved – give the citizenry the facts and the probabilities – then surely the general public should be persuadable that life is not only getting better but becoming less risky for most of them. It seems reasonable to hope and expect that improved risk communication would produce benefits all round. However, Slovic expresses great doubts about overcoming public anxiety simply by putting more effort into raising the public’s knowledge of risk; simply by seeking to make the public more like risk experts and statisticians in the way they evaluate risks. Slovic’s doubts and reservations – about getting the general public to think more like risk experts – are based on findings from research that he has been pursuing with others for almost thirty years. He found that even when individual perceptions of risk can reasonably be described as exaggerated they cannot simply be dismissed or discounted as the product of ignorance or irrationality. Risk perception reflects human psychological attributes that equip individuals to make judgements quickly in circumstances where they have only a modest amount of information. The ability to make quick judgements, based on limited amounts of information about risks, is an important and a valuable human attribute. It is an attribute that helps to explain how human beings negotiate stressful and/or unfamiliar situations. Simple models and decision-making rules, which can be used as guides to action, make sense in circumstances where there is uncertainty, significant inequalities of power and resources, and a lack of personal control. Social values can also play an important role in influencing what is perceived as risky and untrustworthy, and what is not; social values can also strongly influence how risks are managed and judged. While experts might be expected to make their judgements about risks based on an assessment of costs and benefits, which are based, in turn, on the probabilities and relative costs and benefits of different outcomes, the population as a whole is much more likely to base its risk judgements on values and emotions and ideas about fairness that feed into serviceable risk-related rules of thumb. One rule of thumb, which seems to have played a major role in public perceptions of how risks associated with BSE are perceived, depends heavily on the degree of trust that citizens feel able to place in one another and in public figures and institutions. Slovic provides a number of examples of the role of social values and emotion (what exponents of the psychometric paradigm, for studying human risk perception, refer to as ‘affect’) in everyday risk perception. One of those examples concerns attitudes to the use of X-rays in industry and in medicine. Even though the use of X-rays in a medical environment poses a risk, as it does in any other environment, the public’s estimation of that risk is strongly influenced by assumptions about who controls the X-ray machine and what they use it for. 87

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Food, risk and politics Trust in the doctors, who make use of X-rays in their diagnoses, makes medical X-rays much more acceptable than industrial X-rays, quite independently of any questions about the X-ray doses involved. Public suspicions about the use of X-rays in industry were found, by Slovic, to contrast sharply with public acceptance of the use of X-rays in medicine. The medical use of X-rays was judged to be high in benefit and low in risk and readily accepted. The industrial use of X-rays was judged to be low in benefit, risky and therefore unacceptable. The dependence of levels of trust upon judgements about the character and motivation of those who ask or expect others to trust them means that the perceived motives of public officials can play a decisive role in how they (and their actions) are judged. And trust, in both the public (and the private) sphere, appears to be much more easily lost than won. What Slovic refers to as the fragility of trust is the basis for what has come to be known as the asymmetry principle: trust is much easier to destroy than it is to create; something that reflects a bias in the way that human beings respond to what Slovic calls trust-building and trust-destroying events. While building trust is generally a demanding and time-consuming business, trust can evaporate rapidly, possibly in response to a single trust-destroying event. The politics of BSE serves to illustrate important features of the asymmetry principle very well. Negative (trust-destroying) events are much more likely to be noticed than positive (trust-building) events. The appointment of expert committees to guide policy on BSE and the publication of considered expert opinions and advice attracts little notice compared with pictures of a government minister trying to get his daughter to eat a beefburger. The pictures of the minister and his daughter, originally intended to reassure, became quite potent when they were shown, many years later, and invited questions about the minister’s character and judgement. Indeed, trust-destroying events are more likely to carry greater weight with the public than those that are designed to and prove capable of increasing public trust. Announcements about the numbers of new vCJD victims were not only very widely reported but their impact on the public’s views about the government’s performance and competence was undoubtedly greater than any number of reports about reductions in the numbers of infected cattle and the increasingly stringent application of the government’s SBO ban. Slovic goes on to describe what he calls ‘another idiosyncracy of human psychology’, when he presents a third aspect of the asymmetry principle: sources of bad or trust-destroying news tend to be viewed as more credible than sources of good news. In the case of BSE, criticisms of government by campaigning groups such as Friends of the Earth and the Soil Association appear to have been accepted much more readily than announcements by the government itself, both before and after Stephen Dorrell’s statement in the House of Commons linked 88

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BSE and vCJD BSE with vCJD. Although Sir Richard Packer does not describe the loss of public support and increasing distrust of policy makers, he reports in terms of asymmetries in the creation and destruction of trust, he does make it clear that he became acutely aware, during his time as Permanent Secretary at MAFF, that distrust and suspicion of the government had grown so great that the consumer movement appeared to enjoy a considerable advantage over the government in communicating about risk with the general public. The fourth factor underlying the asymmetry principle is what Slovic refers to as ‘the tendency [once trust has given way to distrust] for distrust to reinforce and perpetuate distrust’. One piece of advice often given to ministers and others in political life is that if they are in a hole they should stop digging. It seems, if the asymmetry principle is accepted as offering useful insights into the role of trust in risk politics, that there comes a point when it ceases to matter whether the subject of public criticism is continuing to dig or not; whatever they do they are destined to be told they cannot get it right. Of all the issues that are now linked with BSE and vCJD it is the impact on confidence in government, that students of risk politics and food safety need to come to terms with and do their best to explain. Despite the assurances of honest dealing with the public contained in Sir Richard Packer’s account of The Politics of BSE there was a dramatic loss of public confidence in 1996 and a continuing problem for European governments in regaining the trust of the public. That problem can be traced back to the widespread public perception that risk managers could not be trusted following the 1996 announcement. When, in 2001, the results of a Eurobarometer study were published evaluating public attitudes to risk, science and food safety, the agri-industry and politicians were most frequently cited as having ‘the greatest responsibility for the mad cow disease problem’ by a representative sample of EU citizens drawn from across the member states (EUBar, 2001). Over two-thirds of those asked who should be held responsible for the ‘mad cow disease problem’, who expressed a view (and about 40 per cent of the sample felt unable to do so), indicated that they believed that political leaders should shoulder much of the blame; ranking political leaders close behind the agri-industry. It may, as Sir Richard Packer argues, be unfair but it is an important, indeed it is a central fact of modern political life, that political leaders who give the impression that they are being less than open with the public are routinely exposed to a very great risk of suffering a dramatic and potentially disabling loss of public trust. Paul Slovic relies on the words of Abraham Lincoln to drive home the point for him; Lincoln is known to have written that: ‘if you forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens you can never regain their respect and esteem’ (Slovic, 1999: 45). 89

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5 GMOs and food – is anyone listening?

Debate, suspicion and incomprehension – but still, can we still talk? Unlike the other chapters in this book there is no single food scandal or crisis that symbolises the subject matter of this case study chapter, the risk politics of genetically modified food. However, there are two sets of linked events, one involving a scientist who worked at the world-renowned Rowett Institute and lost his job there in 1998, and the other, a national debate known as GM Nation? or the GM Public Debate, which took place in 2003 and was presented by government as part of its great GM Dialogue on which the future of genetic modification (GM) in Britain might well depend. Both will be described and briefly discussed at the start of this chapter. The motivation for introducing the discussion of genetic modification in this way is to set the scene for readers in a way that is both informative and engaging. The two cases, concerning the researcher Dr Arpad Pusztai and the conduct GM Nation?, supply useful background material for the subsequent assessment of a very public battle, a battle which continues unabated, about the introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into British agriculture and into food. The GM Dialogue, an initiative launched by the British government, included a review of GM science, an assessment of the economic costs and benefits of GM crops, and a wide-ranging public consultation on genetic modification known as GM Nation? The Debate, sponsored by Defra, the successor department in Britain’s central government to MAFF, and the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and also supported financially by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Although it was presented as an open public consultation on the future of genetic modification in British agriculture and food production there was always a good deal of ambiguity about its purpose. Given the desire of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to facilitate and advance GM research and technology in Britain the GM Debate could 90

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GMOs and food easily be viewed as a means – a public relations exercise undertaken on behalf of government – to prepare the way for the commercialisation of GM crops. Ministers hoped that by canvassing public opinion about GM they would be able to reduce high levels of public opposition to GMOs and crop trials and, at the very least, soften public hostility to the introduction of foods that contained genetically modified ingredients. It has also been suggested that the Debate represented a genuine attempt by government to develop new forms of public debate in order to explore the acceptability of genetically modified materials being grown in Britain and, in the longer term, other major technological developments, such as the use of nanotechnology and other technologies about which the public was thought to be poorly informed and prone to be unduly influenced by ill-informed, unreasoning and emotional opposition. It is important to point out that when the government accepted the recommendation of the Agriculture and Environmental Biotechnology Commission (AEBC), made in 2002, that there should be a public debate on GM, there was no suggestion that any conclusions emerging from the debate would be more than a consideration for government in making decisions about the future of GM. The government, after considering science, economics and public opinion, would have the final say in shaping public policy and deciding on the extent to which it facilitated or restrained the development and application of GM science to food production in Britain. The circumstances surrounding the publication of a research report in The Lancet, prepared by Dr Arpad Pusztai of the Rowett Institute, and the publicity attracted by Pusztai’s doubts about the safety of using GM in agriculture in 1998, alerted the British public to the extreme sensitivity of government, the scientific establishment and the food industries to anything that called the safety of food containing GM ingredients into question. Pusztai himself appeared, at least at first, to be bemused by the controversy surrounding his work and the anger and criticism that his work and his attempt to communicate its possible significance generated. His appearance as a David, fighting not one but several Goliaths, was skilfully exploited by opponents of GM and helped to give the impression that the scientific establishment believed that there was much more at stake than the outcome of a scientific quarrel about the reliability of laboratory findings and the adequacy of Pusztai’s abilities to formulate and test hypotheses. What the controversy surrounding Pusztai’s work and the conduct and outcome of the GM Debate illustrate, is the intensity of scientific controversy and the degree of mutual suspicion that has come to surround the subject of genetic engineering. Both cases also illustrate the tendency – a theme of this chapter – for the proponents and opponents of GMOs to end up talking to themselves and their supporters and past one another rather than genuinely 91

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Food, risk and politics debating the strengths and weaknesses of their respective points of view. The subject of GMOs has had a striking ability to divide protagonists, entrench differences and to direct attention away from matters which might be settled by appeals to evidence. Public discussion is regularly driven on to the rocks of disputation about values and motives, where it is most unlikely to help resolve differences about weighing evidence or what should count as evidence about the risks, costs and benefits of GM. This is one of the reasons that a key notion in contemporary risk politics, the precautionary principle, has become the focus of some of the fiercest arguments between proponents and opponents of GMOs. Advocacy of the precautionary principle, which will be discussed at some length later in this chapter, has become a rallying point for opponents of GMOs; they typically reject the idea that risk regulation must (or can) be uncompromisingly evidence based. Proponents of GM suspect that appeals to the precautionary principle and constant references and appeals to uncertainty dignify a deeply irrational, unedifying and emotional hostility to science. In the heat of battle there appears to be little scope for compromise and the fundamentalism that pro- and anti-GM camps find in each other’s position has itself become the key ingredient in further entrenching mutual suspicion. Guy Cook, whose work will be discussed later in this chapter, has shown just how rich the language of mutual suspicion and mutual abuse has become: ‘GM proponents attack their critics as unscientific … .using unscientific, emotional, even irrational arguments’ as they do so (Smith, 2005, reproduced on the cover of Cook, 2004). The reasons why so much of the continuing GM debate has turned into what Cook describes as a war of words needs to be carefully considered, because the propensity to express ideas in ways that fuel mutual distrust and incomprehension has profound implications for the conduct of risk politics in any society that claims to be, or at least aspires to be, a democratic polity. The science and the politics of GM, and the risks and the benefits of GM, have come to be viewed through two different prisms. One can be labelled the prism of uncertainty, which is in constant use by the opponents of GM, and the other, the prism of scientific possibility and great technological bounty, is constantly in use by the proponents of GM, who are excited, almost beyond belief, by its possibilities. This no doubt reflects the fact that the stakes are perceived as being very high on all sides. One camp battles for technology that it believes could literally save mankind and the planet and the other for a technology that could destroy humanity along with its home. An illustration of how one side of the battle over GM views the other, that can be multiplied many times over, and an example that is mirrored in the intolerant remarks of opponents of GM that appeared in the New Scientist in 92

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GMOs and food February 2006. Graeme Doody expressed his annoyance at the remarks of Peter Riley of GM Freeze, who had been reported in the New Scientist as arguing that, ‘most people remain sceptical of [the genetic modification of crops] because … industry has failed to convince them that there are benefits and [that GM is] safe’ (NS, 2006a). Doody combined his criticism of those whom he clearly regarded as ignorantly and thoughtlessly opposed to GM with a strong implied criticism of the New Scientist itself; a science magazine which should, he clearly believed, have been a more committed and less equivocal platform for communicating the potential of GM. His blast against the public, the New Scientist and Riley, criticised: A well-fed and largely unscientific European public [making] a ready target for doomsday portrayals of GM research as a greedy conspiracy to engulf the countryside in a tide of ‘contamination’ with the sole purpose of increasing corporate profits. (NS, 2006a)

It went on to complain that: Evidence-based debate gets no headlines in an emotional and largely uninformed conflict between songbirds and GM rapeseed. Some demonstration of potential clear-cut environmental benefit seems to be the only means of restarting reasoned public debate. Could crossing nitrogen-fixing legumes with wheat or other crops fill that need? Just publicising some research into this might go a long way towards disarming emotive jibes about ‘Frankenstein food’. (NS, 2006a)

The two sets of events alluded to in the introduction to this chapter can be used to yield two very different impressions. The Pusztai affair illustrates both the ferocity with which scientific controversy has been conducted over GM and a much more divided scientific community than the most committed proponents of GM often suggest is the case. The GM Debate illustrates the great scope that exists for initiating a public and good-tempered (if ultimately disappointing) discussion about the future shape of policy on a complex technology where scientific research and discovery, promising new technologies with great commercial possibilities, has alarmed and inspired the proponents and opponents of GM in equal measure. GM science and a very public row In April 1998, Dr Arpad Pusztai, who was a well-known and well-established researcher at the prestigious Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, in the course of an interview on British television, announced that a genetically modified potato which he had been feeling to rats had inflamed the rats’ guts. In the course of an interview that lasted just two-and-a-half minutes he expressed his 93

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Food, risk and politics anxieties about what GMOs might mean for the population if they became a part of the human diet. He said that it would be ‘very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs’. By implying that his research had a direct bearing on GMOs and the future of food for human consumption he undoubtedly lit a blue touch-paper. It is unlikely that he understood just how big a row his remarks would cause and how politically charged they would become. He certainly didn’t anticipate the personal consequences for himself and his wife of going outside the normal channels of scientific discourse. At the Cornell Genetically Engineered Organisms Public Issues Education Project (GEO-PIE) Pusztai’s short television statement is described as having launched a ‘fire storm of controversy’ which was followed by ‘a series of increasingly heated editorials in the prestigious British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and ultimately calls by the British Medical Association to ban all genetically engineered (GE) foods until “proven safe”’ (BMA, 1999). Pusztai was asked to publish the data on which his television claims were based. He was also sacked from the Rowett Institute, and his wife, who also worked there, lost her job too. The Royal Society (an establishment home for many of Britain’s most eminent scientists) conducted what the Cornell GEOPIE has called ‘an unorthodox closed-door evaluation of Pusztai’s unreleased data’, in which it was concluded that: ‘his study was “flawed in many aspects of design, execution, and analysis and that no conclusions should be drawn from it”’ (GEO-PIE). Puszati, no doubt deeply wounded by the way in which he had been disowned by the Rowett Institute, sought an opportunity to publish his data in a way that would be scientifically respectable; a way that would subject his work to a proper peer review. The Lancet, possibly to avoid charges that it had succumbed to establishment pressure and censored politically embarrassing scientific findings, published Pusztai’s work some eighteen months after his television interview had been broadcast. The medical journal found itself at the centre of another fire storm, if anything more intense than the one that surrounded Pusztai and the Rowett Institute following Puszati’s short television interview. So much heat had been generated in academic and scientific circles that The Lancet felt it necessary to introduce Pusztai’s work with a carefully crafted account of the review process to which it had been subject: … it has been peer reviewed by six specialist advisers – a nutritionist, a human pathologist, a veterinary pathologist, an agricultural geneticist, a plant molecular biologist, and a statistician – who had several requests for clarification about the design of the study, laboratory methods used, and the statistical tests applied. Some advised rejection; others encouraged us to go ahead and publish … [One reviewer,] while arguing that the data were ‘flawed’, also noted that, ‘I would like to see [this work] published in the public domain so that ­fellow scientists can judge for themselves …

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GMOs and food if the paper is not published, it will be claimed that there is a conspiracy to suppress information.’ (Lancet, 1999b; see also Ewen, 1999a and b)

What exactly was it that Pusztai had done that attracted so much scientific questioning and public interest? For three years (from 1995 to 1998), while he worked at the Rowett Institute – where he had already been employed for more than three decades and been involved in more than 250 scientific studies – Pusztai had undertaken a series of experiments with GE potatoes which were first of all tested for their toxicity on insects and then subsequently fed to rats. The potatoes were genetically engineered to express snowdrop lectin, a protein which Pusztai had shown to be toxic to insects but believed to be harmless to mammals. The experimental work that Pusztai undertook, which led to his controversial public statements, compared how rats fed on raw and cooked GM potatoes fared alongside rats fed on unmodified potatoes of the same variety. Pusztai concluded that it was the genetic engineering of the potato variety with which he was working, not the lectin protein, that the GM potatoes had been modified to express, which somehow caused damage to the immune systems and guts of his experimental animals. Pusztai’s experimental approach, presentation of his results and the application of statistical techniques employed in his work have all attracted criticism. Critics of his work note that lectins may be ‘toxic, and antinutritive, and even allergenic (in wheat and peanuts)’ (Cornell GEOPIE). Uncertainty – even bafflement – over Pusztai’s findings are not altogether surprising. What was particularly surprising and disturbing to many of those who closely observed what happened in the wake of his television interview was the determination of the head of the Rowett Institute and parts of the British scientific establishment to suggest that his research was so poor and so misleading that it should not and indeed did not need to be discussed further. Pusztai’s exclusion from the Rowett Institute and criticisms of him and his work served to fuel suspicion that there was indeed a conspiracy to suppress scientific work that was embarrassing to those parts of the food industries that stood to profit most handsomely from the adoption and widespread public acceptance of new GM technologies. One observer who has been very sympathetic to Pusztai, Andrew Rowell, who has written for the Daily Mail and written an account of food politics in Britain entitled Don’t Worry (It’s Safe to Eat), has provided an account of the way in which Pusztai was treated after he suggested that there was a potentially serious problem with GM foods. It points an accusatory finger at members of both the scientific and political establishments in Britain, and links their attitudes and actions to powerful commercial interests both in Britain and abroad. Rowell describes a ‘diminutive Hungarian-born scientist, who had ­escaped 95

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Food, risk and politics the terrors of Stalinism to enjoy a brilliant 35-year academic career’ and then became ‘a reviled figure: ostracised by colleagues, vilified, and gagged’ (Rowell, 2003b). He draws attention to the fact that it was the Scottish Office Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department that commissioned the three-year research programme, in which Pusztai was centrally involved, into the safety of GM materials that led to his experimental work with GM potatoes and rats. Rowell argues that Pusztai, who was 68 years old when the Rowett Institute dispensed with his services, had been kept on there, past the normal retirement age, because he was particularly successful at attracting funding and commissions for the kind of research that had helped to make and then sustain the Institute’s international reputation. Rowell is also keen to explain that the head of the Institute at the time Pusztai’s comments created public controversy, Philip James, was said to have been the recipient of at least one phone call from 10 Downing Street shortly after Pusztai appeared on television raising doubts about GM ingredients entering the human food chain. Rowell sources this claim to another senior researcher at the Rowett Institute who was told that: … the phone calls went from Monsanto, the American firm which produces 90% of the world’s GM food, to Clinton and then to Blair … and Blair rang James … (Rowell, 2003b)

These were quite extraordinary allegations that seem to tie together national political leaders and commercial interests in a conspiracy to manage science and what entered the public domain about GM. By their very nature these kinds of allegations are unlikely ever to be proved or disproved to the satisfaction of those who either pooh-pooh them or find them entirely credible. What they did (and continue to do) is sow seeds of doubt and suspicion that are likely to be carefully nurtured by opponents of GM and by media organisations that can see a good story, whatever its merits or demerits. The coverage in the press of an orchestrated assault on Pusztai and Pusztai’s reputation as a scientific researcher with something to say about GM greatly concerned leading members of the British scientific establishment. One particular story, published in the Guardian in November 1999, when there was an intense debate about Pusztai’s work appearing in The Lancet, suggested that the editor of The Lancet had been the subject of bullying by a leading member of the Royal Society. The allegations were made against Sir Peter Lachmann, whose firm refutation of them is discussed later in this chapter. The editor of The Lancet at the time, Richard Horton, was not prepared to name the person whom it was alleged had telephoned him and whom, it was suggested, had warned him that ‘his job would be at risk if he published controversial ­research 96

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GMOs and food questioning the safety of genetically modified foods’ (Flynn and Gillard, 1999). Horton was prepared to say that he had received a telephone call on 13 October, two days before The Lancet published Arpad Pusztai’s research paper, in which he was told by the caller that it would be immoral to publish a paper which he knew to be untrue. Horton claimed that the telephone call had begun in a very aggressive manner and that ‘it would “have implications for his personal position as editor”’ if the paper was published. Peter Lachmann, who had been a fellow of the Royal Society for seventeen years at the time the call took place, is said, in the Guardian report, to have confirmed that he rang Dr Horton to discuss Horton’s ‘error of judgement’ in deciding to publish Pusztai’s paper. Professor Lachmann described any suggestion that he had made threats against Horton as ‘absolute rubbish’. When Dr Arpad Pusztai’s research paper finally appeared in The Lancet the BBC’s News Online science editor, Dr David Whitehouse, commented that: ‘It is there not because it is good science. It is there because it caused a fuss. A fuss brought about by single-interest pressure groups and the media.’ Whitehouse continued: ‘ … that such a piece of work can be published this way is bad enough … what is worse is that its publication is effectively an admission that science has failed to get its arguments across to the public’ (Whitehouse, 1999). Whitehouse goes on to lament the lack of a champion from within the scientific community able to stand up for its values and derides the performance of those ‘who should have taken up the banner [of science], such as the UK government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Robert May, and the Cabinet enforcer, Jack Cunningham’; indeed Cunningham is labelled as ‘ineffective’ in the Pusztai affair by Whitehouse. The idea that a government enforcer might have a useful role to play in such an affair, expressed by a BBC science editor, is itself quite remarkable and even shocking. It is also extraordinarily naive. Whitehouse then speculates about whether British science is itself responsible for the public coming to think that ‘GM technology is being forced on them by scientists who care little for the common good’; finding it difficult to reconcile ‘the bickering and confusion that surrounds a controversial and politically-explosive piece of research’ with the scientific community, which he clearly knows well and believes is ‘crammed full of intelligent, gifted, compassionate and responsible people’. Whitehouse’s comments are, of course, based on an obvious misconception and wholly unreasonable expectation; it is the notion that there is a single scientific community that could reasonably be expected to have a common view about GM, as well as a shared view about how science should be conducted and communicated. The search, for a workable level of agreement about the latter – doing and communicating science – is not only a much more modest goal than reaching a scientific consensus about the part that GM should play in our 97

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Food, risk and politics lives and in our food; it is also a more realistic goal. The difficulties of reaching agreement on that are not simply a challenge for the scientific community, they are an intensely political challenge for the whole of the population in any liberal democracy. GM nation? Seeking to engage the public in science and public policy A remarkable attempt to extend the opportunity to engage in an open and constructive public debate and, at the same time, increase the capacity to discuss complex technological issues was launched by the British government in 2003. Its strengths and weaknesses and its potential for development also served to set the scene for a discussion of risk politics and the politics of GM in particular. From the government’s point of view GM Nation?/GM Debate, which was announced in May 2002, was part of a three-pronged GM Dialogue intended to inform decisions about what should happen following farm-scale GM crop trials conducted to assess the risks of GM herbicide-resistant crops on biodiversity. It should be noted that no GM crop had obtained all the approvals needed to permit commercial cultivation in the UK. In its GM Public Debate: Lessons Learned from the Process, published in March 2004, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), claimed that ‘feedback from those who took part suggest that the debate was welcomed and valued by the public’. It was reported that a thousand people attended the six regional launch meetings and that a further 675 local meetings had taken place across the UK. The website that was part of the GM public debate, GM Nation?, had received 2.9 million hits (and 25,000 unique visitors). The Steering Board for the debate had received 35,000 feedback forms and 1,200 letters or e-mails. All this activity was said by those evaluating the Debate independently of government, to represent ‘unprecedented levels of interest, participation and considered discussion about complex matters of science and policy amongst a relatively large number of the general public’. Surely this was a success by any reasonable standard, for an exercise that sought to engage the general public in government policy making and in a complex and highly contested area of public policy? Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs did not seem to be entirely sure about that when she made a statement on GM policy to the House of Commons in March 2004. Margaret Beckett made it clear to the House of Commons that she considered the future of GM in Britain was ‘a difficult issue bedevilled by confusion’. The GM Debate/GM Nation? experiment in public consultation had: Reported a general unease about GM crops and food and little support for the early commercialisation of GM crops.

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GMOs and food The Secretary of State reported that the GM Debate had shown that: People already engaged with the issues were generally much more hostile [than those who were not and that] [t]hose not so engaged were more open-minded …

However, those who came to the Public Debate more open-minded, even though they were ‘anxious to know more [remained] … very cautious’. They also, and this could not have been anything but a disappointment and a matter of regret to a number of the Secretary of State’s colleagues, including the Prime Minister and Lord Sainsbury, the science minister, became more hostile as they learned more about GM (Beckett, 2004). The caution that the public who engaged in GM Nation? expressed, and most especially the hostility that the Debate suggested was associated with learning more, should not be allowed to call into question an important innovation in public consultation. Rather it should have stimulated the government to consider how it could strengthen and improve the process. Given the view held by many advocates of GM, that public ignorance is one of the main reasons why the advantages of GM are not sufficiently strongly reflected in public policy, the discovery that a deeper engagement may strengthen rather than reduce support for precaution and may even result in greater hostility to GM suggests that lack of public understanding is not the principal hurdle that advocates of GM need to surmount in order to ensure that they have greater public support. The Understanding Risk Team, who had been asked to carry out an independent evaluation of GM Nation?, were more sophisticated than the Secretary of State in laying out what GM Nation? had delivered and interpreting its results. They began their report with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary’s definition of deliberation: Careful consideration with a view to decision. The consideration and discussion for and against a measure.

While they were convinced that the process of deliberation was worthwhile and that it should be valued in a liberal and democratic society for its own sake, they were also convinced that GM Nation? could have been greatly improved and that the results it produced were by no means a reliable indication of what such public consultation could achieve. The Debate had been much less representative than it could have been. It was poorly resourced and the consultation and deliberation it entailed were far less transparent than they could have been. This was, in part, because the government remained unclear about what it wanted from the Debate, for which it was paying, and what it would do with the results. The dialogue with experts, which was intended to be part of the deliberative process was, in the view of the independent evaluators from the Understanding Risk team, ‘limited’ and 99

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Food, risk and politics highly variable in quality. Even though the Debate had provided opportunities for the public to register their views, and the opinions and information that had been gathered were scored highly in terms of their ‘richness’, the extra opportunities that the Debate had offered were assessed as having been ‘limited’. The government had hoped that there would be mutual learning and that the Debate would ‘complement the science and economic strands’ but, by and large, this had not happened. The Debate had been, in short, a missed opportunity. It could and should, if it had been better funded and government had been more strongly committed to it, a much more productive exercise than it turned out to be. Despite the unrealised opportunity, the Understanding Risk team praised GM Nation? as ‘innovative’ and ‘meaningful’ and ‘enjoyable for participants’. Its strengths could be built upon and its failures could be remedied. To overcome and address its weaknesses, it would have been necessary to have prepared more thoroughly and to have facilitated public deliberation better by providing more of the materials needed to deliberate well in advance of public meetings and discussions. There was, the Understanding Risk team believed, a long way to go in terms of ‘engaging the broad mass of [the] disengaged members of the lay public’, and considerable scope for a ‘joined up’ media strategy that could have raised public awareness and improved both representativeness and levels of public participation. The Understanding Risk team concluded that a government that was truly committed to public participation in decisions about new and controversial technologies needed to develop a tool-kit for what they referred to as ‘appropriate deliberation’. No single method or scheme of deliberation could be expected to do justice to the range of issues that concerned both public and government. There were some topics, such as nanotechnology, where public understanding was limited and the need to hear what experts had to say was a vital prerequisite for public deliberation. A deliberative jury, where participants could hear from and question experts, might be the best way of approaching such matters. Where the issues raised were either less technical or primarily concerned with the consequences of different kinds of public policy, it might well be that ‘regional forums’ would enable representatives of local communities to deliberate and consider how a new and easily transmissible disease should be dealt with or a new, expensive and potentially life-saving treatment should be managed and provided in the interests of the population as a whole (Understanding Risk Team, 2004). Above all else it was necessary to engage the public in good time to avoid the situation where public consultation was likely to be judged as a sham by the public. James Wilsdon and Rebecca Willis, of Demos, in their See-Through Science: Why Public Engagement Needs to Move Upstream, voice the opinion of many of 100

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GMOs and food those who supported and were involved with GM Nation? but were nevertheless disappointed with its results, it simply ‘took place too late to influence the direction of GM research, or to alter the institutional and economic commitments of key players’ (Wilsdon and Willis, 2004: 19). Asking the public what they want and what they think in good time, at a point in the policy-making process when national leaders and key officials are willing and able to take their views into account, is a precondition for proper deliberation. It is one of the ingredients for the mutual respect that open discussion, genuine engagement and deliberation depends upon. Another ingredient of constructive and respectful debate about any complex scientific issue is a well informed understanding of the issues under debate. GM and GE are complex matters but many of the issues they raise are not impossibly difficult to understand. Genetic engineering and genetic modification – what’s it all about What exactly is genetic engineering and what is meant by genetic modification? Genetic engineering generally refers to technologies that involve taking DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecules from different sources and combining them under carefully controlled conditions in the laboratory to make new genes; genes contain the information needed to make cells and proteins. But the laboratory is not the only place where new genes are created: genetic modification is going on all the time and is achieved, in animal husbandry, by crossbreeding and by mutagenesis, which includes the random genetic changes (or mutations) that occur in nature. In the case of genetic engineering the genetic modifications that result from the engineering become part of an organism and result, where the engineering has been successful, in traits that were not characteristic of the organism before it was modified. Adding genetic material to an organism became possible because of the growth of scientific knowledge including the discovery of DNA, and a series of scientific advances that made GE or recombinant DNA technology possible. Amongst the first experiments in recombinant DNA technology was scientific work in the early 1970s that utilised the E. coli bacterium to express a salmonella gene. Almost immediately there were concerns about unintended and potentially hazardous results from the use of recombinant DNA technology. Work with recombinant DNA technology has become increasingly ambitious and includes the development of transgenic animals: mice and fish which express genes that have been introduced from other organisms. The motivations for developing recombinant DNA technology are many and various. Research into GM has applications in understanding and combating human disease, raising agricultural output, reducing pollution and making industrial processes 101

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Food, risk and politics more efficient. Commercial cultivation of GM plants dates from the mid-1990s, when genetically modified plants tolerant to herbicides or themselves producing an insecticide, were introduced to agricultural markets. When GM plants are taken outside of the laboratory there is a risk that they will interact with other organisms in ways that are harmful. For this reason, in most jurisdictions, there are controls and regulations aimed at detecting and preventing environmental damage. Regulation normally entails approval before the release of GM materials from the laboratory and in advance of commercialisation. It is the fear of untoward and damaging impacts following their release from the laboratory that has generated both scientific and popular concern about GMOs. For some, concerns about GMOs also express a deep anxiety about meddling with nature, while for others the issues raised are essentially empirical and practical. The variety and complexity of the issues raised by GMOs and the differences that exist between nations in terms of public attitudes and regulatory practices means that public policy in different parts of the world towards GMOs may itself become a source of friction between nation states. When plant GMOs, created in the laboratory, enter the environment there is a possibility that the modified genes that they contain will, as a result of cross pollination, enter the general population. Where there are fears that new characteristics, made possible by GM, may give rise to previously unsuspected problems in nature or agriculture this very possibility can become a matter of deep public concern. One particular issue that has received a great deal of publicity concerns the possibility of using GM in order to protect intellectual property in new genetic strains; to introduce a so-called terminator gene. A terminator gene would render seeds produced from the germ seeds originally purchased by the grower sterile, and necessitate the purchase of fresh batches of seeds at the beginning of each growing season. Another GM possibility concerns GMOs containing a ‘traitor’ gene which would require the annual application of a spray to activate the trait introduced by GE in the first place. The activator would have to be purchased from the supplier company. Indeed, many of the anxieties that were expressed about GM relate to the kinds of commercial power that might come with a widespread use of GMOs in agriculture, rather than concern about GM itself. Companies such as Monsanto and AstraZeneca have been a particular target for the critics of GMOs, who say they are concerned about a loss of variety and independence affecting the ability of growers and farmers to make decisions for themselves in the light of local needs and circumstances. Staff at the Office of Science (at the US Department of Energy) drawing on the Human Genome Project (HGP) have provided a short briefing note in response to a series of questions: What are genetically modified foods? What benefits do they have? What controversies are there about them? While no ­answer 102

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GMOs and food to these questions is likely to be uncontroversial the Office of Science note makes a number of important points and is especially valuable in setting out what it labels GM food benefits and controversies; and what others might call GM benefits and risks (US Office of Science). It begins by observing that while ‘biotechnology’ and ‘genetic modification’ are terms that are often used interchangeably GM is a special set of technologies that alter the genetic make-up of living organisms (animals, plants and bacteria) and biotechnology refers to ‘using the living organisms or their components, created by GM, to make products that include wine, cheese, beer, and yoghurt’. The Office of Science goes on to claim that ‘in 2006 there were a total of 252 million acres of transgenic crops planted in some 22 countries by 10.3 million farmers’. The majority of the crops under cultivation were said to be ‘herbicide and insect-resistant soy beans, corn, cotton, canola, and alfalfa’. Some of the GM crops being grown commercially had been bred for resistance to viruses that might destroy crops in parts of Africa and might help, by producing staples containing extra iron and vitamin C, to reduce the risk of chronic malnutrition in parts of Asia. The countries that grew the most transgenic crops were located in North and South America. The United States accounted for 53% of transgenic crops grown in 2006, Canada for 6%, Argentina 17%, Brazil 11% and Paraguay 2%. India grew 4% of the world’s transgenic crops, China 3% and South Africa 1%. Despite this concentration and even though the Office of Science expected growth of transgenic crops to plateau in industrialised countries, it anticipated ‘exponential progress in GM product development’ and great benefits in developing countries where it expected the planting of transgenic crops to increase substantially. The change in the distribution of GM crops which it anticipates relates directly to some of the great controversies about GM, in particular: Who will GM benefit? Will it be the world’s poorest nations and the most malnourished of populations or will it be major corporations that own the scientific property that is contained in GM plants and materials? The benefits and risks or controversies that the Office of Science lists as being associated with GM embrace a large number of important and contentious issues and help to explain why debate about GM often becomes very heated. The keenest advocates of GM believe that GM crops can enhance the taste and quality of the food we eat; reduce the time that it takes for plants to mature; increase yields and nutrients in the plants that form staple diets; enable plants to grow in much less favourable circumstances; improve resistance to disease and pests; and encourage new products and growing techniques. GM is also said to offer the possibility of creating animals that are hardier, more productive, and easier and cheaper to feed; increase yields of meat, eggs and milk; and improve animal health and veterinary interventions. It is also claimed that GM can be made ‘environmentally friendly’ with the development of ‘bioherbicides and 103

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Food, risk and politics bioinsecticides’ which reduce the need to use environmentally damaging herbicides and insecticides. All this adds up to increased food security for growing populations. GM is presented as the key to human health and prosperity in a world that is likely to be increasingly stressed by such things as global warming. The risks or controversies also make up an attention-grabbing list. GM could pose a number of safety threats: the potential human health impacts of GM relate to such things as allergens and the transfer of antibiotic resistance; there is the possibility of unintended and damaging transfer of transgenes through cross pollination and the possibility of as yet unknown effects on organisms, including soil microbes; and the possibility that interactions between GMOs and the environment will affect/reduce biodiversity. GM could lead to conflicts over intellectual property rights: this might result, at least in part, from economic power over food markets being concentrated in the hands of the chief executives of international companies; a growing dependence of developing countries on the richest and most scientifically advanced states; and, what is referred to as bio-piracy, what the Office of Science labels ‘foreign exploitation of natural resources’. There are also ethical risks associated with GM including: loss of or lack of respect for the ‘intrinsic value’ of nature and ‘natural organisms’; and the questionable use of genes from other creatures to advance human interests, without regard for the welfare of animals or the natural environment. GM also brings with it potential for great controversy over the amount of information made available to consumers: this, according to the Office of Science, poses many questions about transparency generally and such things as labelling in particular. There is hardly anyone who has heard about genetic engineering and genetically modified organisms, and taken the time to think about what it may mean for humanity and the world we live in, who will dispute that GM is pregnant with possibilities. Almost everyone who contemplates the possibilities and believes that powerful new technologies should not become a purely private matter will be moved to ask, much as Brian Ford has done: How can we ensure that its power is used for good, and not for ill? (Ford, 2000: 65). Ford makes it clear, in The Future of Food, that he believes that any attempt to answer this kind of question in a democracy, entails a quest for the best means to empower the whole of the public to ‘participate in the decisions that underpin the introduction of … new techniques’. Lachmann and confronting Panic Nation Professor Sir Peter Lachmann, who has already appeared in this narrative, is one of Britain’s most eminent scientists and a contributor to what has been 104

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GMOs and food described as ‘the most comprehensive debunking exercise ever mounted’ (Feldman and Marks, 2006). His emphasis, in explaining how the public can become more involved, is focused rather differently. Sir Peter has few doubts that the public will only be able to play a full and constructive part if the irrationality and panic that he believes mars British public life is confronted and banished by a vigorous assault on a ‘witches brew of anti-science agenda’ that ‘alarm the public … to bring about a situation that is both farcical and alarming’. (Feldman and Marks, 2006: 226). A lack of respect for good science and a willingness to accept irrational and unscientific arguments is, according to Sir Peter Lachmann, the hallmark and the curse of our age. Nowhere does Sir Peter believe this is easier to demonstrate than in the public’s distrust of biotechnology and the genetic science and engineering that underpins it. Sir Peter is described in Panic Nation (subtitled Exposing the Myths We’re Told about Food and Health) as a medical immunologist. There can be no doubting Sir Peter’s qualifications or his eminence in the scientific community. He is an emeritus professor of immunology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. He is also President of the Federation of European Academies of Medicine and, most relevant to the matters discussed in this chapter, he chaired working groups on BSE and GMOs for the Royal Society. He is by any standards a very high­powered scientific commentator on biotechnology and GMOs in particular. There can be no mistaking Lachmann’s anger at the way in which Arpad Pusztai’s research made its way into the public domain or his contempt for what he describes as anti-scientific and ill-informed campaigning. And Sir Peter leaves his readers in no doubt about who he blames for the climate of fear and anxiety that has come to surround genetic engineering and GMOs. A motley group of campaigners and their anti-science fellow travellers are to blame. Nevertheless Sir Peter declares himself mystified at the public response to GMOs and compares it with the public anxiety about BSE which, in his view, did pose ‘a serious threat to animal as well as risks to human health’. What he describes as the ‘public furore’ about GM foods is a different matter: ‘it rests on no reliable evidence base and falls little short of mass hysteria’ (Feldman and Marks, 2006: 225). How, he wonders, can the British public be so easily misled? But in posing such a question Sir Peter reveals an extraordinary ignorance of the psychology of fear and the dynamics of public opinion. An ignorance that leads him to write in a way that is more likely to inflame than to moderate public hostility to GM. To describe the public’s reaction as hysterical or near hysterical misses the point, a point of profound importance to scientists and policy makers. Unfortunately, it is the tendency of many of those who are eminent in the scientific establishment to talk down to lesser mortals in a way that appears to 105

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Food, risk and politics confirm not only their own remoteness from everyday concerns but also their unwillingness to engage directly with the fears of the population at large. No doubt Sir Peter would point to his contribution to Panic Nation, under discussion here, and to his detailed blow-by-blow account of the role he played in the Pusztai affair as an attempt to reach out to the general public. However, the impression that he conveys of his outlook and his motives is very different. What Sir Peter appears to do, in everyday parlance, in his piece on GMOs in Panic Nation, is to play the man rather than the ball. Only when he has finished expressing his anger and disgust at the combined forces of bad science, an ill-informed media and a mendacious body of lobbyists, does he give his undivided attention to the marvels and the extraordinary potential of the science, which he clearly believes is critically important for the future of humanity. There appears to be remarkably little insight into the drivers of public anxiety and distrust or awareness of the scientific findings of psychologists such as Paul Slovic, and lawyers and political theorists such as Cass Sunstein who have elucidated and explored the well-springs of fear and risk perception. It is a lacuna in Sir Peter’s approach to public anxieties about new technology that characterises many of the angry outbursts of eminent scientists and some public-policy makers. Who are the targets of Sir Peter’s criticisms and why? Science and scientists, other than Arpad Pusztai, and a small number of other renegade figures are not to blame. Leading biotechnology companies, most especially Monsanto, must accept a good deal of the responsibility for what has gone wrong. Those companies are described as having ‘mishandled [the] introduction of two particular GM products’ and, as a result, handed an alliance of pressure groups and campaigning media the opportunity to attack genetic science and vilify those involved in its development as well as its commercialisation. The dramatis personae, in the tale of opposition to GM, include those such as Monsanto, who made it easy for scaremongers to make credible claims about conspiracy and fraud. There was a walk-on part for millions, the gullible public, in this drama; those involved in the crowd scenes accepted criticisms, some of them no doubt justified, of commercial undertakings which then became inextricably bound up in the public imagination with gene science and genetic engineering. And there were those, a small number from within the scientific community, who appeared to have betrayed the standards of that community in permitting poor science to appear in print and to gain a degree of respectability, which it most certainly did not deserve. The notoriety – in Peter Lachmann’s view – that very poor work was allowed to achieve can only be described as an own goal. A select group, including Dr Mae-Wan Ho and Sir Edward Goldsmith, who Lachmann believes, want to damage the public reputation of genetic science. Sir Peter’s readers are left with an impression of an embattled scientific community; a community with a vision of a better world which finds itself having 106

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GMOs and food to deal with a world that has gone mad. The picture that the most determined opponents of GM paint is, according to Sir Peter, based on a purely illusory conspiracy against poor farmers; the positively ridiculous proposition that farmers have been duped and have been persuaded to act against their own commercial interest, by bullying and mercenary biotechnology companies prepared, for the sake of profit, to do things that are hazardous to human health and the environment. This is – Sir Peter suggests – so far removed from the truth that its seeming grip on the public imagination may be read, by the scientific community, as an invitation to despair. Sir Peter’s picture of opposition to GM has its counterpart. Those who are most hostile to GM paint a picture that is very like the one that Sir Peter describes but in their picture they paint many scientists (though by no means all) as collaborators in a common enterprise with untrustworthy and dishonest biotechnology companies and self-deceiving and (quite possibly) dishonest public-policy makers. It is a nightmare world in which there is little possibility of finding common ground or understanding, and discussing sincere differences: it is a great divide. Johnson and Cook This great divide is one that both Brian Johnson and Guy Cook recognise and have written about. Johnson, the former Head of the Biotechnology Advisory Unit at English Nature, deplores ‘the general failure to communicate risk and benefit assessment in a way that engenders trust’. But he understands that the public’s suspicion of GM is far more than the knee-jerk reaction of millions of individuals who are either ignorant of the potential benefits of GM, hopelessly gullible or mindlessly opposed to new technology. The public is not, in his view, either uniform in its outlook on GM or simply indifferent to the potential benefits of GM. Like the scientific community the ordinary citizen works with the materials and information that is readily to hand; especially information that has proven serviceable in making judgements in the past. Amongst those materials are the failures of scientific assessments and experiences of previous technological advances. Those experiences include such things as ‘BSE and foot-and-mouth fiascos, nuclear power disasters, and DDT toxicity’. (Johnson, 2004: 137) For all those who are even modestly risk averse it is sensible to examine and compare enthusiastic advocates of new technologies (and the technologies they commend) with the record of their predecessors. The public is not equipped to make fine distinctions between different parts of the scientific community and may be quickly and understandably alarmed when scientists have difficulty 107

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Food, risk and politics managing their own affairs. If, as Sir Peter Lachmann acknowledges, genetic science is far from easy to understand, the behaviour of those who purport to represent and champion it is an obvious proxy for those seeking to make judgements about the science itself. We are all, when faced with someone we suspect of trying to baffle us with science, drawn to judge their science by making an assessment of their character. We are also likely to wonder, even if attempts are made to simplify the science so that we might find it easier to grasp the essentials, if the version we have been offered simplifies too much. Are important things being left out? Are matters that complicate the picture being overlooked? And, if we suspect they are, we may well grow more suspicious of the messenger, however impressive their qualifications. Johnson also makes the point that unqualified and unconditional support for any technology (especially new technology), however potent and beneficial it might be considered to be in the right hands, makes very little sense. ‘Technologies’, he writes, ‘are neutral’. For that very reason fundamentalist and unwavering supporters or opponents of any particular technology are likely, in a liberal democracy, to arouse suspicion. Why, for example, are some [scientists] so stridently pro-GM – pro a technology, rather than persistently and patiently explaining that the real issues are about what you make with the technology, and how you deal with public anxieties about the control and use of [its] products. (2004: 137) It is a criticism which Johnson says he also applies to the anti-GM campaigners. He says that he follows Richard Dawkins in wondering why: ‘if you declare you are pro or anti [any particular] “substances”, anyone should listen to you?’ Guy Cook and the team of researchers he led at Reading University have, though starting from a different place, made many of the same points and come to very similar conclusions. Cook is the author of Genetically Modified Language (2004) and, with his co-workers, “The Scientists Think and the Public Feels”: Expert Perceptions of the Discourse of GM Food’ (Cook, Pieri and Robbins, 2004). Both the book and the article drive to the heart of what has become an impasse in the communication of risk and the formulation of public policies: managing and regulating GM in ways that stand a reasonable chance of winning and then retaining public approval. Fully aware that almost all debates about public accountability and new technologies, including GM-based technologies, end up focusing attention on the nature of communication between ‘experts’ and non-experts, Cook set out to make sense of what almost everyone who has studied the politics of food has found in the case of discussions of GM: an absence of trust, a growing sense of frustration (on all sides) about the quality and relevance of public discussions about GM, and a battery of complaints from all the stakeholders who believe 108

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GMOs and food that they are the ones who should be listened to. These are the complaints not just of the ‘experts’ but of all those whose participation in public discussion of GM seems to be an obvious precondition for making informed and well­supported public policy. What Guy Cook, Elisa Pieri and Peter T. Robbins claim to have found, based on an analysis of 50 hours of in-depth interviews with GM scientists, non-experts and other stakeholders in the GM debate, is clear evidence of ‘rhetorical devices used by scientists [that] … ultimately undermine participation by non-experts’ in debates about GM. The rhetoric of the scientists that Cook and his colleagues talked to suggested that, for the most part, they started out from a view that simply assumed ‘non-experts’ were incapable of taking part in a sensible discussion about GM. Non-experts were effectively disenfranchised by their ‘lack of knowledge, understanding and objectivity’, and, above all, by what was assumed to be a limited capacity to reason, from taking part in a sensible and productive discussion about GM. The viewpoint expressed in interview after interview with GM scientists convinced Cook and his colleagues that even though many of the scientists they talked to subscribed to a ‘deficit model’ of public understanding of science their doubts about public capacity to understand GM science and reach sensible conclusions about it went deeper. Cook reports that ‘in their emphasis on public ignorance … our expert informants generally subscribe to a “Deficit Model” (Gregory and Miller, 1998)” (Cook, 2004: 37). The so-called deficit model suggests that suspicion of or opposition to new technology can be attributed primarily to a lack of knowledge and that if those who are opposed or suspicious can be appropriately educated – the deficit in their knowledge reduced or removed – it will become possible to overcome their opposition. Interestingly, as experience with the GM Debate/ GM Nation? demonstrated, learning more about GM is far from being a certain route to welcoming it. In the absence of knowledge, the deficit model implies that public evaluations of new technology will be largely or wholly based on emotion. Hence the title of the piece that Cook and his colleagues wrote for the journal Discourse and Society: ‘Scientists Think and the Public Feels’. Cook and his colleagues explain that they were wholly unconvinced by the proposition that opposition to GM was primarily emotionally driven or that it could be overcome by remedying the public’s lack of knowledge. They came to the conclusion that public suspicion of GM was based on far more than emotion. Fear of GM technology no doubt played a part and media reports and speculation might generate anxiety but the ‘non-experts’ had their reasons, which GM scientists seemed unwilling or unable to acknowledge. In the series of interviews that they conducted with GM scientists Cook and his colleagues found that a common view among scientists was that ‘opposition 109

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Food, risk and politics to GM [emanates] from self-interested individuals and organisations acting upon a malleable and passive public, rather than from the public itself ’ (Cook, Pieri and Robbins, 2004: 440). Cook argues persuasively that argument about GM is far more complex than GM scientists have, by and large, been prepared to acknowledge. By framing arguments and disputes about GM in a way that suggests the general public is easily led by malevolent influences, the complexity and range of expertise that is relevant to public discussion of GM is simply ignored or dismissed. The idea that there is more than one legitimate frame of reference for evaluating GM technologies and that many different people, including those with expertise that is not particularly well recognised amongst GM researchers, have something worthwhile to say is strongly promoted by Cook and his colleagues. Cook insists that: [GM] like other technologies … can be viewed morally (is it justifiable?), economically (what does it cost?), socially (who benefits?), politically (who controls it?), aesthetically (does it make food more pleasing to the senses?), and scientifically (is it safe?). (Cook, Pieri and Robbins, 2004: 441)

Non-scientists, they found, were much more willing to consider all these ‘frames as valid and triangulate different storylines when making decisions about GM’. The idea that GM is complex, not simply because of the science, but also because of the many moral, economic, aesthetic and political issues it raises did not seem to occur to the GM scientists that Cook interviewed. The ease with which those who publicly questioned GM were compared by eminent scientists with historical villains, such as Hitler, and with religious fundamentalists by, most notably Lord May (the President of the Royal Society), underscored, in Cook’s view, how difficult the scientists he and his colleagues interviewed found it to accept the idea that there were multiple frames of reference that not only could but should be used in evaluating and formulating public policy on GM (Cook, 2004: 31–35). One of the most interesting features of Cook’s work and analysis is that it has led him to become deeply critical of the unwillingness of many members of the scientific community to (a) show an appreciation for areas of expertise other than their own, and (b) to demonstrate that they have an awareness of the need to communicate in a variety of different ways with those who question or challenge scientific orthodoxy. It is odd that even though we live in a society where considerable importance is attached to public participation and involvement in democratic decision-making, public participation, on more or less equal terms with members of the scientific community, has proven so hard to achieve. In Cook’s opinion one of the most ‘striking aspects of the interviews with GM scientists, in contrast with non-specialists, is the general dearth of references to 110

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GMOs and food major arguments in the wider national and international debate [about GM]’ (Cook, Pieri and Robbins, 2004: 445). The public interest is perceived as being almost entirely concerned with questions of food safety. The fears that scientists appear to have about the bounded rationality of the general public and of those whose opinions, particularly the most militant environmental campaigners, are thought to carry most weight with the public, reinforces a deficit model of public opinion which is likely to be an obstacle to communicating more successfully. Cook’s concern is with the bounded rationality of GM scientists themselves. A conversation in which information and opinion flows back and forth between scientists and all the many stakeholders who have an interest in science but who have something important of their own to say is, Cook suggests, a vital first step if a genuine dialogue about GM is to begin. Food, science and precaution – a key part of a genuine dialogue Risk and opportunity go together in the debate over genetically modified (GM) food. The very great uncertainties associated with both the risks and the opportunities of GM mean that the arguments about GM food are likely to rage on for many years, if not decades. Some scientists fear that genetically engineered plants may contaminate wild plant populations, worsening rather than relieving or resolving the problems of food production and pest control. Others fear that genetically engineered creatures may escape from controlled environments and alter ecosystems and, in the process, destroy or undermine genetic diversity, thereby threatening wild populations with extinction and depleting the gene pool. It has also been suggested – indeed that is precisely what Arpad Pusztai is widely believed to have suggested – that genetic manipulation may give rise to new allergens or toxins. Some supporters of GM foods and genetic engineering argue, with a chutzpah equal to that of their opponents, that GM plants can produce all that we need; they will make it possible to produce higher-yielding, more disease-resistant, longer-lasting crops including crops that will mean that farmers are no longer dependent on the use of chemicals that do endanger human beings and ecosystems. It is not only the uncertainties of GM science and technology and distrust of biotechnology firms that may create a sense of public unease about GM and where GM is leading us, it is also the scale and remoteness of some of the institutions that are involved in determining the ways in which GM comes to market. In July 2000 Keith Nuthall, writing for the Environmental Health Journal, observed that: ‘Over the past year, European public confidence in GM products has dropped through the floor, while countries have grappled with seed-planting, trade law and the use of the precautionary principle’. Nuthall 111

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Food, risk and politics drew attention to the connection between international trade agreements and the management of food-related risks and, as he did so, the application of a principle that has become one of the most contested aspects of the public debate about GM. The interconnectedness of food safety regimes (risk assessments, actions and policies) and international trading agreements, and the remoteness of the institutions that oversee the modern food economy make it harder for consumers to be sure about where decisions about the food they eat are, ultimately, made. Is it possible that there is a universal safety principle that might guide the actions of governments, food companies, risk regulators, scientists and the international organisations charged with responsibility for coordinating all their efforts? It is against this background of institutional and scientific complexity and uncertainty that students of risk politics and food safety may be invited to consider whether an apparently simple principle, the precautionary principle, which is said to put safety first, should become the chief guide for public-policy makers and risk regulators whose principal duty it is to treat the public interest as paramount. However, the precautionary principle or notion that safety comes first turns out to be anything but simple. Scientists, public-policy makers and the CEOs of the world’s largest food companies are all aware that risk is omnipresent and that they are far from omniscient. Decisions of all kinds, in business, science and government, have to be made on the basis of limited and what may be flawed information. And decisions frequently need to be made in ways that balance risks and opportunities, benefits as well as costs in circumstances where uncertainties cannot be set aside. Some may suppose – as Guy Cook found when he interviewed GM scientists – that the public’s approach to risk is very different from society’s most powerful, important and intelligent decision makers. And then go on to assume that risk regulators are being asked – are expected – by the general public, to do the impossible: not simply to put the public interest first but to keep the public safe in all circumstances – to treat safety as an overriding goal of public policy. The interpretation and application of the precautionary principle and public expectations about how the principle should be interpreted and applied have become the focus of a fiercely contested debate in the social sciences, and intense arguments amongst lawyers and politicians about what can reasonably be expected of risk regulators and the public authorities. The precise parameters of the regulatory environment, in which approvals for GM crops and the labelling of GM ingredients are determined, has become the cockpit for debate about the meaning and application of the precautionary principle. It is a debate that will be considered at greater length in the conclusion to this book, but it is essential, in closing this chapter, to make the point that any suggestion that the precautionary principle implies an absolute intolerance for risk or that the 112

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GMOs and food general public believes or expects that society’s risk managers will pursue the goal of ‘zero risk’ is ill-informed and misguided. As Guy Cook has argued in ‘Scientists Think and the Public Feels’, ‘most people understand very well that nothing is risk free, and are able to “live with” uncertainty and the lack of control that it entails’ (Cook, Pieri and Robbins, 2004: 438; Wynne, 2002). The real choice in managing the risks and uncertainties of GM is where to rest between two principles, not one principle alone. The choice lies between a precautionary and a reactionary principle. Under what circumstances should society’s preferences result in a collective risk management strategy that is uncompromisingly and pre-emptively forbidding of all actions where there is uncertainty? In what circumstances should society’s preferences result in risks and uncertainties being accepted, until there is evidence that is judged sufficient to restrain or forbid a particular practice, innovation or development? Neither unqualified precaution nor reaction can be expected to satisfy reasonable public expectations about the weight that should be attached to public safety. Precaution and reaction must be informed and it is deciding how they are informed that is one of the principal tasks of risk politics.

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6 Dioxin – scares without borders

The Belgian scare and the Belgian crisis No single food scare story better illustrates, at least during the period of a national election, the proposition that: ‘Risk management has become a dominant concern of public policy yet the ability of governments to anticipate the strength and focus of public concern remains weak’ (Breakwell and Barnett, 2003: 80). The Belgian dioxin food scandal of 1999 turned Belgian politics upside down. The political fallout from public suspicions of government duplicity came quickly and dramatically to the government of Jean-Luc Dehane, who seemed to be on course for re-election before the dioxin in food scandal hit Belgian society. If ever there was what the American academic Cass Sunstein has called a ‘social cascade’ in a liberal democracy, which changed that country’s government in a matter of weeks, the dioxin scandal was it. It was a food scandal that appeared to validate many of the observations of psychological researchers about human risk perception and the psychometric paradigm that they had developed (see Slovic, 2000 for an account of the psychometric paradigm and its development). Such things as probability neglect, dread and the availability heuristic all seemed to be at work in Belgium in May 1999. And, just as the Belgian national psyche appeared to be recovering from the scandal and its political aftermath in June 1999, schoolchildren from all over Belgium began to report feeling ill after having drunk bottled Coca-Cola. While the national government reacted by introducing controls on the sale of Coca-Cola products in Belgium, cases of ‘poisoning’ were also reported in Northern France. Laboratory tests and independent chemical analyses failed to establish any clear cause for these poisonings and Belgians were left to ponder the possibility – indeed the probability – of ‘mass sociogenic illness’ (Nemery, Fischler, Boogaerts et al., 1999). For all those interested in risk politics and food safety and committed to more publicly accountable risk regulation the Belgian experience of 1999 should give pause for thought. 114

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Dioxin The food scare that hit Belgium in late May 1999 rapidly transmuted into a national and international political scandal of unprecedented seriousness for Belgian society and for its political leaders. Evidence that high dioxin levels had been found in hens and eggs was announced to the Belgian public and communicated to the European Commission by the Belgian Ministry of Agriculture. The official release of test results confirmed that high levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) had been found in Belgian agricultural products. It was rapidly followed by an official ban on the sale of chicken, meat and eggs. The Agriculture Ministry explained that these foods were likely to have been contaminated by dioxin and related chemicals known as PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). With just days to go before European and national elections the Belgian government, led by Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehane, found itself under the most intense and critical scrutiny. It was confronted by an extremely anxious Belgian public made more anxious still by a rapidly mounting volume of allegations about official incompetence and government delays in acknowledging a major contamination episode affecting Belgian agriculture; intense press speculation about the scale of the threat to public health ratcheted up public alarm. Two weeks later the Belgian Prime Minister, his party and its coalition partner were removed from office by the Belgian public and Mr Dehane’s eight years in charge had come to an abrupt and unanticipated end. The political impact of one of Europe’s most memorable late twentieth-century food scares is underlined by the fact that just days before the announcement that Belgian farm products were potentially hazardous to health Mr Dehane had a clear poll lead, and good reason to believe that his Christian-Democrat and Socialist coalition would be returned to office. It was a result he had every reason to expect and to view as a reward for his government’s successful management of the Belgian economy. This chapter sets out to address three broad questions, in light of the transformation in Christian-Democrat electoral prospects and the rapid rise in public alarm about dioxin contamination of food: What is known about the seriousness of the threat to human health presented by POPs such as dioxin? What made allegations and evidence of dioxin and PCBs in Belgian farm produce so politically and socially potent? How should students of risk politics and food safety view the whole dioxin in food episode and its significance for publicly accountable risk regulation of food safety in liberal and democratic societies, and the contemporary food economy? Dioxins, PCBs and POPs The term dioxin refers to many tens of different chemicals that remain in the environment and that can concentrate in animal tissue, including human ­tissue. 115

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Food, risk and politics In a briefing note that it issued in 2001 the European Commission claimed that only 17 of the 210 different dioxin compounds were thought to be of toxicological concern (EC, 2001). Dioxins arise as a by-product of chemical processes – some of those processes can be described as natural, such as forest fires and volcanic eruptions, and others are industrial and associated with human activity. The latter processes include making paper, burning waste, manufacturing steel and the manufacture of many different chemicals for industrial and other uses. Dioxins that are produced naturally and as a result of human activity can appear throughout the natural environment. They can be found in soil, water and in the air. When they are absorbed and accumulate in body tissues, whether of humans or other creatures, they pose a variety of health risks and have been identified as carcinogens (cancer causing agents). Contamination by PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), another group of compounds that are classified as persistent organic pollutants, is typically accompanied by dioxin contamination and accumulation in fatty tissues in particular. There is a great variety of sources of information about PCBs and dioxins including the United States Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization (WHO). Information has been steadily growing about how dioxins and PCBs enter the environment, accumulate in and are concentrated in animal tissues and enter the food chain. There is even hope that one of the most disturbing features of POPs, including dioxins, may be addressed by science and biotechnology. Early in January 2003 New Scientist and Nature reported on the work of Michael Bunge of the University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany who had isolated a bacterium that appeared to be capable of digesting dioxins and overcoming their toxicity. Bunge and his fellow researchers have continued with his research and in 2007 they reported on Benzoate-driven dehalogenation of chlorinated ethenes in microbial cultures from a contaminated aquifer in the journal of Applied Microbiological Biotechnology (2007). The European Commission, in a study published in 2001, estimated that 80% to 95% of human exposure to dioxin occurred through the ingestion of food, principally foods containing animal fats from meat, poultry and dairy products. While food safety authorities are also aware that industrial accidents and releases can increase human exposure it is the ingestion of food that serves as the principal vector by which dioxin gets into the human body. However, the problems of determining what is and is not safe, when it comes to dioxins and other POPs, are considerable. This is the principal reason why it has been especially difficult to reach international agreements and settle on a common view about target or safe levels of dioxin in the general environment. Despite this the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) successfully called for negotiations to control POPs. In May 2001 the European Union, the USA and ninety other countries became signatories of a United Nations treaty known 116

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Dioxin as the Stockholm Convention (UNEP, 2001). The Convention contained an agreement to eliminate or reduce the production, use and release of twelve key POPs. It also specified procedures that would enable governments to develop further controls on POPs. One critical aspect of the work needed to build a scientific consensus that is of use to regulatory authorities, is reaching agreement on the amounts of dioxins known to threaten health that can be permitted in the food chain. The World Health Organization has developed the notion of a ‘tolerable daily dose/intake’ (TDI, 1999). However, public health authorities and individual consumers face enormous (arguably insuperable) problems in trying to regulate or control exposure to environmental and food-borne dioxins because they are ubiquitous in the environment and can enter the food chain at many different points. Determining background levels of dioxin contamination and distinguishing background levels from dioxins that are being added to the environment is immensely problematic but important in terms of fashioning effective regulatory action. For regulatory authorities the challenge is to develop a range of measurements that might help to build greater confidence about the quality and reliability of official knowledge about dioxin release and dioxin-related threats to health. Buzby and Chandran, agricultural economists who have worked for the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Division, refer to one incident in July 1997 when a US agency found elevated levels of dioxin in chickens, eggs, farm-raised catfish and animal feed. They noted that after a lengthy investigation the source of the dioxin contamination was found to be animal feed that had been produced using ‘ball clay’ from a Mississippi mine. The clay had served as an anti-caking agent in soya bean meal. The manufacturers of the feed had no good reason to believe that its use was associated with the introduction of highly carcinogenic material into the human and animal food chain. While governments may be told to move quickly to stop dioxin contamination they can only act if they can identify and remove sources of contamination. It is probable that in many circumstances regulatory authorities remain entirely unaware of the presence of contamination and lack the means to track down a particular source, and therefore to control or remove it. The European Union does now have regulatory limits for dioxin in food while the USA does not, pointing to great uncertainties about measurement of dioxins in explaining its stance. The fact that some countries require certification that food has not breached dioxin limits while others do not is an obvious source of friction over trade, and along with controls on GM is something that has found the EU and the US at loggerheads. It also needs to be recognised that any form of scientifically respectable certification is likely to add considerably to the cost of food processing and ultimately to the retail price of food. Estimates of the 117

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Food, risk and politics success that public bodies have had in reducing dioxin exposure suggest there has been a decline in both the USA and the EU since the early 1980s but there are many gaps in official knowledge and uncertainties about sources of dioxins entering the environment. Amongst the greatest of uncertainties is the scale of the threat that dioxins represent to human health. It is possible to formulate very different pictures depending on the sources that are used. POPS/dioxins: impact on health Lok and Powell, based at the Department of Food Science at the University of Guelph in Canada, have observed that a ‘single high-dose exposure of laboratory animals to TCDD (2, 3, 7, 8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin) ranging from less than 1 microgram to a few micrograms per kilogram of body weight is lethal’ (Lok and Powell, 2000: 5). Nick van Larebeke and his colleagues, at the Department of Radiotherapy, Nuclear Medicine and Experimental Cancer at Ghent University in Belgium, in their paper on the Belgian PCB and Dioxin incident of January to June 1999, provide general estimates of cancer risks associated with PCBs and dioxins during the incident. They calculated a body burden (a measure of the concentration of potentially harmful chemicals or their breakdown products found in human tissue) incurred by populations exposed to PCBs and dioxins during the incident. Their conclusion, based on assumptions about average daily intake, Belgian diets and mean body weights, was that between 44 and 8,316 cancer deaths in the Belgian population of 10 million might ultimately be expected due to the Belgian population’s exposure to ‘the combination of both dioxins and PCBs’ (van Larebeke, Hens, Schepens et al., 2001: 270). The considerable range in their estimate of deaths reflects the great uncertainty they had to take into account in attempting to calculate daily intakes of POPs. When their paper was published in March 2001, they drew particular attention to those uncertainties; uncertainties which existed despite the fact that ‘more than 20,000 PCBs and hundreds of dioxin measurements on animal feed, animal fat and different food items had been performed’. At the core of their difficulties was the problem of establishing the additional body burden attributable to the Belgian dioxin incident in the first half of 1999. As they explained ‘no measurements of body burdens before the crisis (were) available’ and the new measurements they could call on could not be used to answer key questions about how body burdens changed before, during and after exposure in the late winter and spring of 1999. Even if before and after measurements had been available it is unlikely that they would have offered a secure basis for making reliable estimates of additional body burdens 118

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Dioxin ­attributable to exposure during the incident. As Nick van Larebeke explains: (considerable) uncertainty (exists) about the extent to which consumed food was contaminated, as sampling of animal fat and food items was not performed in a systematic way, but evolved rather haphazardly during the crisis in response to many different needs and pressures, some from national law European regulatory authorities, and others were commercial in nature. Some of these demands have biased sampling to the more suspect items, others still less suspect products. (2001: 271)

Without a systematic, routine and balanced system of monitoring, which measures contamination in foods and releases into the environment as well as human and animal body burdens, authoritative and comparable data will not be available to public authorities. If regulatory authorities lack authoritative data their regulatory activities are unlikely to carry conviction or to be easily and honestly explained. The work of Nick van Larebeke is arguably the most important and significant not only because of what it adds to our understanding of contamination during the Belgian dioxin crisis but because of what it reveals about the lack of reliable and comparable data, an obvious prerequisite for informed and intelligent policy-making. What does not seem to be in doubt is that even while there is considerable variation in sensitivity to a single-dose exposure amongst mammals to dioxins such as TCDD, low-level long-term exposure causes cancers in the organs and tissues of laboratory animals such as hamsters, rats and mice. The precise mechanisms by which TCDD and other dioxins cause cancers remain a subject of scientific dispute. Disagreements about the most likely mechanisms have been reflected in differences of view about what can be considered a safe or acceptable daily dose of TCDD (if there is such a thing) and variable estimates of the likelihood of disease at different levels of exposure. Lok and Powell note that ‘controversy has resulted in a wide range of different acceptable doses among various countries and organisations from more 0.006 to over 20 picograms per kilogram of body weight per day’. It may be helpful to note that a picogram is defined as one trillionth of a gram and that the best estimate of the amount of dioxins entering the food chain during the Belgian food scare has been put at 1 gram. In 1998, when the World Health Organisation reviewed the TDI (Tolerable Daily Intake) for dioxins it estimated that the TDI should be set at 1 to 4 picograms per kilogram of body weight. While the greatest concern about the threat to human health posed by dioxins has concentrated on their cancer inducing characteristics it should be noted that work with laboratory animals has also implicated dioxins in reproductive and developmental abnormalities. The impact of dioxin on the development of babies and children is a source of very great concern because of the body mass of an infant and the rapidity of its growth compared with an adult. POPs have 119

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Food, risk and politics been closely associated with the disruption of mammalian biology and development. Dioxins are known to compromise the immune system’s ability to fight off infections. Given the importance of the immune response to maintaining health it is likely that dioxins are implicated in a great many different health problems which can be traced back to a weak or compromised immune system. However, the reliance on animal test results to model impact on humans and the complexity of the toxic chemistry that humans encounter in the environment means that there is almost unlimited scope for disagreement about the precise and relative weight that should be given to dioxins and PCBs in accounting for human pathology. What is available to policy makers is epidemiological data that suggest that human populations known to have spent significant periods of time in environments with an abnormally high exposure to dioxin, may not only exhibit elevated cancer rates, but other symptomatology known to be associated with the exposure of laboratory animals to dioxins. Perhaps the last word in this section should rest with Ropeik and Gray, the authors of Risk, a Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You (2000). Both authors are based at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. On the subject of the approach that should be adopted to control of POPs Ropeik and Gray identify a split between European nations and others, including the United States. European nations, they observe, mostly support the application of the precautionary principle – crudely defined as the view that uncertainty should lead authorities to err on the side of caution. Their own national authorities in the US have taken the view that : such a blanket approach ignores the large body of scientific evidence that shows that risks from many POPs is actually very low at the level to which most people are exposed. In the end [referring to the Stockholm Convention – there was], a compromise [which] advocated both precaution and [reliance on] scientific evidence. (Ropeik and Gray, 2002: 453)

The origins of the Belgian crisis and its development The proximate cause of the Belgian dioxin crisis can be traced back to events that took place in January 1999. It is now believed that fat used in the manufacture of animal feed was contaminated by a gram of a carcinogenic dioxin and up to 50 kilograms of PCBs. Precisely how the fat, which was distributed to ten separate feed mills (eight in Belgium and two others in Holland and France) by a single supplier and animal feed producer, was contaminated in the first place remains uncertain. It seems likely that oil drained from electrical transformers had been mixed – whether deliberately or inadvertently has 120

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Dioxin never been established – with used cooking oil. The oil, collected and stored by Verkest, a processor and animal feed supplier, based near Ghent in northwestern Belgium, was almost certainly the unwitting recipient of contaminated material. Verkest, in turn, supplied other animal feed manufacturers with the raw materials they needed for the production of animal feed. The contamination therefore entered animal feed production in many different places even though it is believed to have originated from a single source. A month later one of the feed manufacturers supplied by Verkest, Da Brabender, became concerned at reports from farms that it supplied with its feed that large numbers of mother hens had become sick, chicks were failing to thrive and eggs were failing to hatch. Da Brabender reported its concerns to its insurer at the beginning of March 1999. The firm considered that there was a possibility that feed it had supplied might be the cause of the problems reported to it by its customers. The firm’s insurers in turn invited a veterinary specialist to assess the situation; the veterinarian, Dr Destickere, confirmed the suspicions that had led Da Brabender to contact their insurers in the first place. Da Brabender went on to request a laboratory analysis of the feed it had produced in January and alerted the Belgian Agriculture Ministry to the problems it had identified with animal feed utilising materials supplied by Verkest. Laboratory analyses, completed at the end of April 1999, supported Dr Destickere’s hypothesis, which was that dioxin contamination of animal feed was the cause of the veterinary problems he had found. Verkest had meanwhile been given notice that it was suspected of having broken regulations governing the manufacture and distribution of animal feed. The Belgian government was then faced, at the end of May 1999, with a stream of allegations in the media suggesting that it had known for a month or more about the contamination of animal feed and the consequent hazard to human health but had failed to alert the public. Such a charge, on the eve of a general election, was extraordinarily difficult to refute or manage. Test results which became available on 26 May showed high levels of dioxin in eggs and hens and led the government to order controls on 417 poultry farms that were thought to have purchased feed made from the raw materials originally supplied by Verkest. Within twenty-four hours poultry and products using eggs were taken from the shelves of retailers. Measures to remove these products were followed a few days later by the introduction of controls on the slaughter and movement of cattle and pigs and the removal of meat products from retail outlets across Belgium. In the meantime both the Belgian Public Health and Agriculture ministers had resigned from office in what the Belgian Cabinet described as a measure aimed at restoring public trust. However, both ministers were reported to believe that they had handled the discovery of contaminated animal feed and 121

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Food, risk and politics farm products appropriately. Newspaper coverage of the resignations concluded that the resignations would do little or nothing to restore public confidence and the government’s decision to suspend campaign activities in advance of the impending general election simply reinforced the impression that the government was losing control and failing to cope with the crisis. The domestic crisis of confidence in Belgium was further exacerbated by reports of an extremely adverse international reaction to the worldwide media accounts of widespread contamination of Belgian produce. The European Commission and countries right around the world in receipt of agricultural exports from Belgium were also reported, in the Belgian press, as being intensely critical of the Belgian government. Bans on food imports from Belgium were quickly announced in at least thirty countries and the German agriculture minister claimed publicly that the problems Belgium and its trading partners had found themselves facing could have been solved if other EU member states had been told earlier about what was happening. When Buzby and Chandran (2003) reviewed the Belgian dioxin crisis for the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service they noted (relying on the work of a group of Belgian scientists led by Nick van Larebeke (2001)) that: • Approximately 500 tons of animal feed was believed to have been contaminated out of a weekly average production of 28,000 tons. • The contaminated feed has been distributed to many different agricultural enterprises including poultry farms, rabbit, calf, pig and cow breeding farms mostly in Belgium but also in Germany, France and the Netherlands. • Some 746 pig farms, 445 poultry farms, 393 bovine farms, 237 dairy farms had used feed supplied by the producers whose production was known to have been contaminated. They also went on to note that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had issued advice to interdict a range of Belgian and European agricultural products so that their freedom from contamination and safety for human consumption could be scientifically established. The products covered initially included eggs, products containing eggs and game meats, animal feeds and animal feed ingredients as well as pet foods; the list was later expanded to include other products, such as soups and cheeses, believed to contain milk. The FDA advice remained in force until 2000. The FDA was most certainly not alone and the range of products under suspicion, as well as the number of countries introducing controls on Belgian produce, rose dramatically in the first three weeks of June 1999 (Lok and Powell, 2000: 9). International reaction as well as domestic reaction in Belgium confirmed the picture of a stampede away from Belgian produce, even Belgian chocolates. 122

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Dioxin ‘Belgian dioxin’ in Belgian food had quickly become big news. Food markets are international and the agricultural products of EU member states are transported over vast distances. This was certainly the case, most especially for Belgian dairy products. It was inevitable that a threat to public health associated with dietary staples such as eggs and chicken would receive enormous publicity and that the release of information, which invited questions about government failure and integrity, would be particularly closely scrutinised and widely reported. As Lok and Powell put it: ‘not only health, but reputation, money, political careers were on the line’ (15). Events moved quickly; there was drama and an endless supply of opportunities to consider who was responsible and to apportion blame. The speed with which the crisis developed, and undeniable failures in government communication with the public, meant that the hunger for reliable and detailed information could not be satisfied. Speculation took over wherever and whenever official information appeared to be incomplete or suspect. Lok and Powell, no doubt accurately but somewhat sarcastically, point out that: ‘the media performed as expected during the crisis’ (15). After all, the Belgian public had been told that what had been released into the food chain was widely believed by experts to be a ‘potent carcinogen and, even at low levels, able to persist in the body for up to 10 years’ (15). As with other food crises, scandals and scares – and there was no shortage in Europe of other food events – news providers were able to compare with the details of the current crisis. There was considerable media mileage in considering how serious dioxin contamination was compared with Britain’s BSE/vCJD crisis and endless opportunities for prognosticating about the likely or eventual outcome of the crisis compared with earlier events. With BSE still in the minds of the European public and a plentiful supply of allegations about a new coverup, the newsworthiness of the dioxin scandal was never in doubt. Apart from a surfeit of opportunities to replay past scandals and crises, each day seemed to bring a new breaking story about dioxin contamination and its impact on government and society. There were food bans, new advice to consumers, adverse international reactions, ministerial resignations, food recalls and farm quarantines. There were also arrests and expert commentary and analysis on every conceivable aspects of the crisis. And there was a general election close at hand. Attempts by the Belgian government to explain that it had acted responsibly by managing the release of information, so as to avoid panic and limit damage to Belgian agriculture, were met with incredulity. As Lok and Powell put it: ‘[The Belgian authorities] looked guilty from the beginning even though the contamination was not … the government’s fault’ (16). Efforts to deny a coverup were unconvincing because the possibility of a serious threat to public health 123

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Food, risk and politics had been known about for at least a month before an official announcement was made. The desire to allocate blame appeared to drive coverage far more strongly than the desire to establish the extent of the risks to which the public had been exposed or determine the best course of action to limit that risk. The imminence of the general election made it imperative for ministers and their supporters to send out the message that they were in control and enjoying great success in bringing matters to a safe and satisfactory conclusion, when virtually all their partners – international partners in particular – were insisting that more time was needed and very many questions remained unanswered. Lok and Powell are almost certainly correct in asserting that: The dioxin contamination would have still been a damaging crisis had the government promptly gone public with the crisis. However, the damage and public scrutiny would have likely been focused more on the faults of the food industry rather than on the government’s mismanagement of the crisis. (17)

The failure to level with the Belgian and international public was undoubtedly the single most important reason why the Belgian dioxin crisis assumed the proportions that it did. Early and complete disclosure is almost always likely to be the best policy and to evoke the most supportive (or least hostile) response from the general public. That is not the same as saying that panic and public anger can be avoided and allayed simply by letting it all hang out. But the prospects of remaining in charge and of being seen to be in charge are greatly enhanced if the political agenda and the news agenda can be set by members of the government rather than by leaks and speculation. In food scandals, scares and crises European governments have learnt that if they do not provide the story others can very quickly be found who will. The assessments of what has gone on (and gone wrong) appear more or less immediately in popular media and are rarely a good guide to what will emerge later, when the significance of events that generated great public anxiety and media interest are considered a little more dispassionately. Analysis Richard North’s account of the Belgian dioxin crisis is written from the perspective of the Europhobe who is deeply antagonistic towards the European Union and the role of the European Commission in food safety and food policy. North looks upon the Belgian dioxin crisis as a handy excuse and ready justification for a power grab by the European Commission. The Commission is represented as opportunist and almost wholly unconcerned with the economic consequences, for farmers and the food economy, of an unnecessary Unionwide regulatory regime. It is a view of EU politics, risk politics and the drivers 124

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Dioxin of food safety in the European Union that has attracted many supporters. It is a view of the political dynamics of scares, scandals and food crises which largely overlooks the role of the media. It also fails to take account of problems affecting food safety that are deeply entrenched in the contemporary, increasingly internationalised and intensely competitive food industry; something that has been discussed in earlier case study chapters. There have also been dramatic alterations – affecting food safety – in the balance of power between retailers and farmers, food manufacturers and the companies that supply them with essential services. North begins his account of the Belgian dioxin crisis with a critique of the European Commission and its proposals for the expansion of the Commission’s responsibilities for food safety set out in Brussels at the start of 2000. The Commissioner responsible for food safety at the time was David Byrne; Byrne is described, by North, as unveiling a White Paper on Food Safety with the Belgian dioxin scare serving as a politically useful backcloth to his announcements. The White Paper contained more than eighty proposals, including a proposal for the establishment of a European Food Authority, and plans for the comprehensive reform of European food law. This was, from North’s perspective, an extraordinary and almost entirely unjustified development of EU law; the extension of a legal system which had been advancing over many years to the point where it had become involved in the regulation of almost every aspect of the work of Europe’s food industries and every part of the European food economy. The new European food safety regime would, as David Byrne was often heard to say, oversee the food economy all the way ‘from farm to fork’. North had no doubt that the Commissioner’s power grab, on behalf of the Commission, carried with it ‘horrendous [cost implications that] threatened to inflate the price hard-pressed farmers already had to pay for their feed, and by an astronomic degree’ (North, 2001: 152). North was most angered by the claim that the plans set out in the Commission’s White Paper were a great contribution to public health and safety. He was convinced that the opportunity costs of European legislation meant that the Commission’s plans were ‘anything but’ a great contribution to public safety. Despite the claims of the Commissioner, that the best interests of both consumers and producers had been considered, North described the new regulatory regime as a ‘cynical and populist demonstration of the willingness of the EU to respond to “public concerns”’. The ability of the Commissioner to present himself as a knight in shining armour – arriving in the nick of time to protect the European consumer – had, in North’s view, been greatly assisted by the Belgian dioxin crisis. It may even seem possible, to readers of North’s account of a power-hungry European Commission, that the dioxin crisis had in some way been dreamt up to help launch its White Paper on food safety. What 125

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Food, risk and politics North appeared to be quite certain about was that the Belgian dioxin crisis had been misrepresented and that that misrepresentation had been used to advance the Commission’s agenda for controlling ever more of Europe’s agriculture. North gives his chapter about the Belgian dioxin crisis, in his Death of British Agriculture: The Wanton Destruction of their Key Industry (2001), a deliberately provocative title. The title does not disguise, nor is it intended to, his purpose and his perspective on risk regulation in Europe and on the significance of events in Belgium. The chapter dealing with the dioxin crisis is entitled ‘The Integrationalists’. Integrationalist is North’s portmanteau term for European political leaders and officials whom he believes will seize almost any opportunity to extend the reach of the European Commission. In the case of the Belgian dioxin crisis the Commission is represented as an ambulance chaser of a particularly revolting kind; it harbours an ambition, to unify and harmonise the regulation of European agriculture, which has proven immensely destructive in almost every member state of the European Union and, from North’s point of view, most importantly in Britain. Some big questions about food scandals, scares and crises and risk politics The events surrounding the Belgian dioxin crisis have already been presented at some length and the threat that dioxin and PCBs represent to human health has also been discussed earlier in this chapter. While North’s account of the crisis and its aftermath directs attention away from Belgium and to an international stage it leaves many important aspects of the crisis largely untouched. The dynamics of the Belgian dioxin crisis, and what North views as the political exploitation of the crisis, raises very important questions for students of risk politics and food safety; questions which, it is claimed in this book, require a much deeper examination than North supplies. Here are some of those questions: • Is it likely that food scares, scandals and crises will, as North suggests, simply serve as an opportunity for powerful established interests to define the public purpose in a way that serves them while ignoring more fundamental goals? • Do food crises, scandals and scares serve to concentrate the mind of policy makers and the general public in a way that facilitates improvements in the organisation and effectiveness of regulatory systems and food safety policy? Or, as has already been suggested in this book, do food scares, scandals and crises have only a modest impact on food safety itself and frequently fail to direct public attention to aspects of the food economy which ought to be 126

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Dioxin much more closely scrutinised? • Is it possible that food scares, scandals and crises, which might be expected to help strengthen public involvement and engagement with risk politics and food safety, have relatively little impact on the quality of public engagement in public-policy making about such things as food safety and even serve to blind us to what is possible? • Is it necessary to understand much more of the dynamics of food scares, scandals and crises in order to reveal the part that media representations of food dangers play in focusing public attention on them, and does the focus encouraged by media coverage lead to the neglect of important aspects of risk politics and the modern food economy, which – as this author believes – help to shape risk politics and food safety? Media power, the social amplification of risk and risk politics There can be no doubt that by making his criticisms of the European Union – and the role of the European Commission in particular – North considered that he was directing his reader’s attention to economic and political realities that were shaping the European food economy; realities that enhanced the power of the European Union at the expense of farmers and others, most of whom had a much better grasp of agriculture than officials in Brussels. An alternative view, presented here, is that the most worrying aspects of risk politics and the modern food economy have little to do with the regulatory reach of the European Union or its civil service based in the European Commission. Rather students of risk politics and food safety need to turn their attention to the role of the mass media in contemporary risk politics and food safety issues. Risk perception and media influences have been closely studied for several decades by academic researchers such as Nick Pidgeon, Roger E. Kasperson and Paul Slovic. Their research has been conducted throughout a period when profound changes have been taking place in the structure of the media and of the food industries. It is the combination of a much more competitive and concentrated food industry, especially in the retail food sector, and heightened public sensitivity to food safety issues that has made it essential, if risk management is to be handled more intelligently and democratically, that our shared understanding of the dynamics of food politics and public opinion is improved. It is clear that the ways in which stories about food-borne hazards and public safety are conveyed by the popular media and our responses to those stories have taken on a very special significance for policy makers as well as the public they are meant to serve. 127

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Food, risk and politics How volatile is public opinion? How responsive is it to media accounts of risk and to the most scientific accounts of risk? To what extent is the political process buffeted by media coverage and shifts in public opinion in response to media coverage? Does coverage of risk events and the public response to that coverage weaken the capacity of our public institutions to make and operate regulatory regimes that will stand the test of time and command public respect? It is surely necessary for all of those who are stakeholders in food safety – not just public-policy makers but also the general public (the biggest and most important stakeholder of all), to understand just how easily risk politics and food safety regulation can be blown off course. The Belgian dioxin crisis exemplifies just how quickly things can change and be changed, and how easily political choices, even the choice of a government, can be altered by a spasm of public anxiety, fuelled by media coverage of a food scare. Media drivers, values and imperatives The kinds of things which excite public interest and generate media interest and coverage have been closely studied by academic researchers, such as Peter M. Sandman. Sandman’s account of the factors that most strongly influence the selection and presentation of environmental risks appears to translate well to the coverage of other risks, including food risks. His work is therefore an excellent starting place for anyone who wants to understand how it is possible for an event, which does not appear to be wholly exceptional, to become a cause célèbre and a catalyst for a change of government, as happened with the Belgian dioxin crisis. Sandman’s insights into the media coverage of environmental risks are also a good starting point for students of risk politics who want to move on to consider the framework developed by social psychologists such as Roger and Jeanne Kasperson. Their Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF) is intended to facilitate the study of the interaction between individual psychology and risk perception, the activities and role of the media, and institutional and political arrangements for communicating and managing risk. Its relevance – to all the case studies in this book – should be clear by the time readers have finished the book. The Kaspersons – and their many colleagues – opened a door, through which others are now able to pass; all those who want to join them in considering such things as social cascades and probability neglect and the ways in which the media shapes public risk perception and public/safety policy agendas. The formation of currents in public opinion that miss out or elide important parts 128

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Dioxin of a complex risk picture, and the very existence of such things as moral panics, explicable in terms of SARF, may have great significance for contemporary risk politics and risk regulation policy making. SARF in Sunstein’s hands The careful examination of the relationship between substantial shifts in public awareness of risk and changes in the environment in which risk regulation is managed by public-policy makers, has been a particular interest of the American academic, Cass Sunstein. Sunstein’s discussion of the need to limit the impact of social cascades – what he refers to at one point in his work as ‘fear as wildfire’ – on public risk management policy will be a major theme of the Conclusion to this book and will be introduced below in an attempt to set out a more balanced account of food safety and risk regulation in Europe than has been provided by Richard North and others, whose closeness to agricultural interests may well render them victims of a very human tendency to focus on some of the most emotionally engaging parts of the risk picture. The aim, of Sunstein and others, is to begin to supply an account of risk politics that has greater endurance and wider relevance to the dilemmas that riskaware policy makers and a risk-aware public need to address – and to ­address, in this author’s opinion at least – together. Complexity, media theory and risk perception, policy and politics There would be little point in introducing what is undoubtedly a more complex and in many ways much less immediately satisfying account of the political and social dynamics of public risk perception, in relation to food safety regulation, than that supplied by Richard North if this did not, at the same time, form part of an examination of the relationship between risk, food policy and the politics of the contemporary food economy. Much greater public understanding of the relationships between individual risk perception, the development of currents in public opinion, their connection with media coverage and with public decision making are, this author believes, prerequisites for a more mature and deliberative – in short – democratic risk politics. Understanding the dynamics of public opinion about risk is a vital step towards a thoughtful realistic appraisal of the prospects for food safety policies and for making judgements which command widespread public support and that can, at the same time, be presented as the outcome of a political process that is open as well as reasoned and reasonable. It is, therefore, to one of the sources most often cited of unreason and un129

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Food, risk and politics reasonableness in modern politics that I now turn: the role of the news values found in the mass media, most particularly the popular press, in determining what risks gets covered and how. Sandman on media attitudes to covering risk Peter M. Sandman, joint author of Environmental Risk and the Press (1987) and ‘Mass Media and Environmental Risk: Seven Principles’ (which can be found in Roger Bate’s What Risk? (1999)), sets out to answer a question found on many different lips and a question he is keen to pose to himself: Does media coverage exaggerate environmental risk? Sandman follows that question with another: What can be done, via the media, to put risk into context? A question that is considered from a number of different perspectives in the extended discussion of popular risk perception and public participation in risk management, assessment and communication that readers will find in the Conclusion to this book. In answer to the first question Sandman makes a series of points that are unlikely to provoke great disagreements with regular readers of the British press and that are useful in accounting for the difficulties that anyone who relies on the mass media alone is likely to experience in making balanced assessments of risk, including food-related risks. Sandman, who is internationally recognised as a leading academic exponent and practitioner of content analysis, has come to the conclusion (not a surprising conclusion) that the amount of coverage accorded to an environmental risk is often a poor guide to the seriousness of the risk in terms of its likely impact on human health. Rather, ‘traditional journalistic criteria such as timeliness and human interest’ exert the strongest influence on what is reported and on how it is reported. When it comes to risk, most stories found in media reports focus on ‘blame’, ‘fear’, ‘anger’ and non-technical issues that have to do with what he labels ‘outrage’ (as opposed to ‘hazard’ – a term which implies the precise measurement of harm or seriousness). Sandman, who has also studied the impact of environmental risk stories on readers, goes on to assert that when ‘technical information about risk is provided in news stories [it generally] has little if any impact on the audience’. Other characteristics of media risk coverage make it clear that ‘alarming content is more common than reassuring content’, aside from crisis situations ‘when an impulse to prevent panic’ may come into play and contain what is reported and how it is reported. The impulse to exercise restraint, in exceptional cases, may be a product of editorial and commercial influences and what Sandman describes as a heavy reliance on official sources (Sandman, 1999: 276). Sandman’s knowledgeable conclusion is that media coverage of risk is more 130

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Dioxin strongly connected with locality, immediacy and visual appeal than it is with seriousness, especially when seriousness is defined in relation to long-term impact (such things as morbidity and mortality considered over years and decades rather than hours, days and weeks). While Sandman believes that journalists have a clear preference for writing or broadcasting stories that are more likely to alarm audiences than reassure them he insists that is not the result of a wish to be sensationalist for its own sake. It is a reflection of what he calls ‘news judgements’. In the newsroom ‘missing an issue [a good story] is a much greater journalistic sin than overstating one’. Not to put too fine a point on it: the most important news stories recommend themselves in an uncomplicated way. Who, assuming any of us were left in charge of a news room or an editor’s desk, would want to publish or broadcast a story prefaced with the observation that: ‘we don’t want to bring you the full story yet, we will only be able to bring you the full story in a week or a month’s time, after we have done all the necessary research’? Even when reporters have taken what they believe is great care to present a story in a way that they consider balanced Sandman explains why there may be a gap, sometimes a very large gap, between the reporter’s and reader’s perceptions of what is and what is not truly alarming. Sandman suggests that reporters of environmental risk may believe in putting out a story about a subject such as chemical contamination, in which they explain that the threat to public health is very small, that they are behaving responsibly. It is likely that the readership includes many people who find it hard to interpret information about low levels of risk included in stories about dangers and hazards; such readers may be inclined to judge that there is a serious problem because a danger is known to be present in their locality and has been named. The simple mention of dioxin as a health hazard, is what may make readers anxious, rather than details about the degree of contamination or the number of parts per trillion of the contaminant that are likely to be ingested. Given public familiarity with notions of newsworthiness – there is after all no such thing as good news – it is even possible that concerted attempts to reassure in news items covering risk and risky events may arouse suspicion in an audience that believes it understands very well what does and does not get into the news. Sandman is well aware that reporters have a job to do and a limited amount of time in which to do it. They rarely have the expertise to guide them through conflicting testimony about the nature and extent of the risk events they have been asked to cover. Reporters do, however, have a clear idea about what it is they want from their sources. They want to be able to draw on a source that they can claim is authoritative and, if they are dealing with a major risk story, they want to be able to say that they have reported it in a fair and balanced way. What Sandman calls basic journalistic and editorial requirements have, in 131

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Food, risk and politics his view, a big impact on how risks are covered. They help to explain a bias in favour of official sources and, in stories that are judged to be more complicated and important, engage in what he refers to as the ‘scavenger hunt’. The scavenger hunt is often a frantic search for a balancing opinion. This is a part of what he calls the ‘epistemology of routine journalism’. … there is no truth (or at least no way to determine truth); there are only conflicting claims, to be covered as fairly as possible … [this means] tossing the hot potato of truth into the lap of the audience … a general assignment reporter on a breaking story just wants to get somebody to say how bad the situation is and somebody else to say it isn’t so bad … [before moving] on to another story. (1999: 281).

Investigative reporters who want to dig deeper and build their reputation as reporters are likely, in Sandman’s view, to find themselves ‘naturally more allied with their alarming sources than with their reassuring ones’ (282). It is much easier, especially in dealing with complicated subjects, to polarise and sharply distinguish points of view. That generally has two advantages over having to work harder still to find a middle ground: it helps to make what is going on easier to explain and it also assists in making a story interesting to a general audience. The very business of making a story easier to understand, and more interesting to read, tends to introduce a bias in reporting that favours opinions over data, narrative over such things as charts and tables, and plain speaking over abstract language and terminology. Sandman concludes that the journalist’s motto, when dealing with risk, is: ‘Above all focus on outrage’ (283). None of this is meant to put news organisations or the reporters working for them in the dock. Most news organisations depend, for the revenue that keeps them in business, on advertising; advertising revenues depend on readership/audience size and this in turn depends on keeping or building audience share. Stories that are easy to understand and that engage readers’, listeners’ and viewers’ emotions have an obvious and uncomplicated attraction for most editors and reporters. The social amplification of risk framework John Eldridge and Jacquie Reilly are well aware of the characteristics of the media coverage described above. Nevertheless, they argue that many accounts of the place of risk in contemporary society are in danger of over-simplifying the media’s role. Sandman’s account appears far from simple – but Eldridge and Reilly describe a process that is more complicated still. In their account, ‘BSE in the British Media’ (Eldridge and Reilly, 2003: 138–155), they acknowledge that ‘media interest is rarely maintained in the face of ongoing scientific uncer132

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Dioxin tainty’ and recognise that even though ‘pressure groups can use the media to force an issue onto the public agenda’, this is no guarantee that the media can be ‘assumed to be automatic allies in the “democratisation of risk”’. The ‘democratisation of risk’ is a far more demanding matter. Sustained consideration of risk, which raises and addresses questions about what is expected to happen well into the future is, in practice, difficult for news organisations to deal with as their ‘basic news principle [is one that] emphasises events of the day’ (140). Nevertheless, the idea that large numbers of people who are strongly influenced by media coverage of risks are also capable of recognising the limitations of modern news reporting, is not particularly revolutionary. Yet it is an idea that all those who entertain the possibility of making risk politics more democratic, better informed and more engaging must surely cling to. A better informed appreciation of the arbitrariness and unreliability of media accounts of risk is likely to be an important precondition for increased and better informed public participation in risk politics. Insights into risk perception and media influence, gained from social and psychological research, have contributed greatly to the development of the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF). SARF is likely to appeal to media savvy citizens, not just to academics, and it is the intellectual offspring of Jeanne Kasperson, Roger Kasperson, Nick Pidgeon, Paul Slovic and others: [It] arose out of an attempt to overcome the fragmented nature of risk perception and risk communication research by developing an integrated theoretical framework capable of accounting for findings from a wide range of studies, including: from media research; from the psychometric and cultural schools of risk perception research; and from studies of organisational responses to risk. (Pidgeon, Kasperson and Slovic, 2003: 13)

The framework was designed to help all of those who are interested in the relationship between individual risk perception, media, politics and the formation of public opinion, to consider how the way in which risk events are communicated affects not only how they are perceived, but also how great an impact they have on society generally and on public policy in particular. The idea that different risk events – a plane crash or a release of dioxin that contaminates the whole of the food chain – are mediated by culture, a variety of different communication channels and social and political institutions, and that public concern can be stepped up or down (amplified or attenuated) in the process was intended to empower social researchers and liberate them from the shackles of any single disciplinary view of human relations and popular communication. The Kaspersons and their colleagues regularly employed the analogy of a stone dropped into a pond, to explain the way in which what may seem to be 133

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Food, risk and politics isolated events can send out ripples that have an impact at some distance. If we change the analogy, exchanging the pond for a complex piece of electrical equipment, one that connects thousands, even millions, of other pieces of electrical equipment, and that forms a network, then SARF can be compared with the study of an electrical system in which signals can gain and lose strength, and coherence and signal strength can be altered, stepped up and down, at a great many different points. When millions of different social actors are part of a great network that influences how they communicate with one another, and what they communicate about, we have a model of risk communication that is able to integrate many different elements, from individuals and the groups to which they belong, to the organisations and institutions that own and control important parts of the communication network through which information and opinions are transmitted. Much of the work on SARF has concentrated on the amplification rather than on the social attenuation of risk communication. It has concentrated on what have been referred to as moral panics (Cohen, 1972) and social cascades (Sunstein, 2005). The Kaspersons and their colleagues were searching, as John Eldridge and Jacquie Reilly have explained, for a conceptual framework ‘capable of integrating the technical analysis of risk and the cultural, social and individual response structures that shape the public’s experience of risk’ (Slovic, 2000: 234). While much remains to be done in developing SARF it has helped social and psychological researchers investigate the ways in which some risk events trigger what appear to be disproportionate public reactions and others seem to disappear without trace. Slovic has observed that: apparently minor risks or risk events as assessed by technical experts, sometimes produced massive public reactions, accompanied by substantial social and economic impacts and sometimes even by subsequently increased physical risks … (2000: 233)

SARF in perspective Eldridge and Reilly, in their contribution to the volume Social Amplification of Risk, in a chapter dealing with ‘BSE and the British Media’, report that they were able to frame much, though not all, of their research into media coverage of BSE and its impact on public opinion using the SARF. They were, nevertheless, left with some very interesting and important questions about the limitations and possible weaknesses of the framework. They say that they resisted the proposition, which may attract some users of SARF, that there is a way of identifying the particular risks that emerge from the studios of the most widely watched television stations or that are expressed in the columns of the most 134

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Dioxin widely read newspapers, that trump all other accounts of risk, including those put forward by experts and policy makers whose concern with hard data rarely seems to be a match for the opinions and feelings of the public at large, or the most convincing media voices that they hear most often. At one point in their article on the British media and BSE, Eldridge and Reilly appeal to the wisdom and insight of the sociologist Robert Merton. Merton wrote: Total subjectivism leads us astray by failing to provide a theoretical place for systematic concern with the objective constraints upon human action. The social, demographic, economic, technological, ecological and other constraints are not all caught up in social definitions. To ignore these constraints is mistakenly to imply that they do not significantly affect both the choices people make and the personal and social consequences of those choices. (Merton, 1976: 176)

Students of risk politics and food safety who are persuaded that we all – or almost all – get carried away in social cascades from time to time, or are drawn into moral panics, are understandably reluctant to treat the product of complex interactions over riskiness, between the watching and reading public and the media, as a sound basis for political judgements about risk. Nevertheless, we may be emboldened by what Merton had to say about objectivity and subjectivity in human perceptions and choices, and by what has emerged from studies influenced and shaped by SARF, to invite policy makers and the public alike to reflect on the ephemeral nature of the media-influenced communication and assessments of risk, which typically depend upon incomplete and often seriously unbalanced accounts of risk. Reflections on the fickleness of mediadriven risk awareness may even assist us in presenting the case for forms of communication and public participation that encourage greater deliberation and that make us less prone, than reports appearing in the mass media do, to accepting instant judgements. Academic researchers and others who have been attracted by SARF, and drawn upon it in their work on the formation of public opinion and popular risk perception, may find that they have a role that extends beyond that of observers and commentators. The ability to reflect on how the media influences opinions and behaviour is one that can be fostered and shared beyond communities of academic researches. Just as cinema audiences have learnt to understand the manipulations of film makers, the general public may have a capacity, that has often been underestimated, for reflecting upon the role that SARF, though it may not be known by such an acronym, plays in risk politics, risk regulation and food safety. Something that could be characterised as a necessary, though by no means sufficient, condition for a more sophisticated and participative risk politics.

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Food, risk and politics Sunstein on fearing the laws of fear in public-policy making Some academic commentators are less hopeful than this author about the popular capacity for reflection and balanced judgement. They fear public vulnerability to the media distortion and suspect that there is a general inability, outside of expert and highly risk-aware communities, to make balanced judgements about risk regulation. One academic, more than any other, has succeeded in communicating how the insights derived from the psychometric paradigm and those contained in SARF, should make us wary of attempting to extend and deepen public involvement in risk politics. Cass Sunstein, who gave a series of lectures in Cambridge in the spring of 2004, brilliantly expounded the case for recognising what he labelled the ‘laws of fear’ and for keeping much of public policy and risk regulation at a safe distance from the general public. Sunstein’s reasons for wanting to maintain a very substantial domain in which public policy is made deliberatively, and at arm’s length from the general public, can be explained relatively straightforwardly. In the fourth chapter of the book based on his Cambridge lectures, The Laws of Fear (2005), he explores what he refers to as ‘fear as wild fire’. Sunstein has no quarrel with the many social scientists, especially social psychologists such as Paul Slovic and anthropologists such as Mary Douglas, who have argued that the ways in which we perceive risk and respond are powerfully influenced by our social situation and our culture. The incomplete and culturally conditioned picture that most of us have of risks and of our vulnerability to social influences alarms him. Sunstein makes his point, in telling fashion, by recounting the extraordinary levels of fear and the extraordinary behaviour that followed media coverage of murders in the Washington DC area in October 2002. The Washington murders, attributed to a sniper or snipers targetting drivers refuelling their cars at petrol stations, resulted in ten deaths and three critical injuries in just three weeks. There were frequent, and what Sunstein takes to be reliable, reports of people living in the Washington area driving hundreds of miles to avoid having to use petrol pumps in Washington DC. In Sunstein’s eyes this provides a classic illustration of what is known as probability neglect. The very remote likelihood of being shot by a sniper was causing Washingtonians to accept a substantially greater risk of death and injury by getting into their cars and travelling great distances. The psychological impact of deaths caused by what turned out to be two snipers could be attributed, in part, to the availability heuristic. Our tendency to focus on events that are literally the most available in judging what is most dangerous: events which we can bring to mind most easily, because we have an immediate, dramatic and emotionally potent knowledge of them. 136

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Dioxin Sunstein was not convinced, however, that either probability neglect or the availability heuristic could explain just how greatly the sniper shootings in Washington in 2002 had affected the behaviour and outlook of Washingtonians. There was something more and he believed that he understood what it was, a social phenomenon widely reported on and understood by social scientists. Whether it was social scientists writing about moral panics or about social cascades it was clear – to Sunstein – that individual and cultural predispositions were a powerful influence on which risks were judged to be most pressing and salient, and which risks could be most easily overlooked. Culture and individual disposition, Sunstein argued, helped to explain a striking difference between citizens of the US and citizens of France. While the French worried about genetically modified crops, which did not appear to be a major concern for most US citizens, US citizens appeared much more concerned than their French counterparts – judging by the annals of opinion research in the United States – about the risks associated with nuclear power and nuclear waste disposal. Sunstein had little doubt that, attuned to the predispositions and cultural frame of reference of the audience for their news coverage, news organisations focused on risks that they expected to resonate with the anxieties of their readers, listeners and viewers. Cass Sunstein was exploring a meshing of insights drawn from the psychometric paradigm, SARF and cultural theories of risk. Into this brew Sunstein stirred the differential ability of political leaders, campaigners and others, many with an axe to grind, to win and hold the attention of the public as a whole. There is what he calls: A vicious circle involving the availability heuristic and media incentives, with each aggravating the other, often to the detriment of public understanding. (Sunstein, 2005: 103)

It is, he argues, the psychological and cultural threats to public understanding, exposed and exploited by contemporary media practices, which make it hard for most of us to come to sound judgements about risks, costs and benefits. Sunstein finds this particularly worrying. When mechanisms that reinforce an unsound and unbalanced assessment of risk are given free rein, then the opportunity for balancing arguments to be heard can be dramatically reduced. Societies that have institutions that are insufficiently robust to limit the possibility of social cascades and their impact on public policy-making, and which are drawn to the most extreme interpretations of the precautionary principle, will end up with risk regulation that is quite literally petrifying. Sunstein paints a picture of risk regulation overwhelmed by combinations of the availability heuristic, probability neglect and cultural and personal predispositions, which leave little room for reason and scientific data to balance risk, cost and benefit in fashioning a reliable risk regulation regime. The problem he identifies, in the 137

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Food, risk and politics public communication of risk, overwhelmed by fear as wildfire, is that: Individuals and societies may be fearful of non-existent or trivial risks – and simultaneously neglect real dangers … Law and policy ought not to reflect people’s blunders; democracy should not mechanically follow citizens’ fears, or for that matter their fearlessness. (105–106)

Sunstein does recognise a key role for values, values that can be clearly articulated and that bear on real choices. He accepts that social values have a vital role to play in informing trade-offs between rival objectives that require us to balance risk, cost and benefit. But the places in which he believes the properly informed balancing of risks, costs and benefits can take place appear to be locales (scientific, political and cultural) from which the general public are largely absent, generally self-excluded and likely to remain absent. Sunstein’s assertion, about the public’s absence from places where public policy is best made may appear, to many, to be well justified. Given the public over-reaction – both inside and outside of Belgium – to the discovery of dioxin contamination of food, a contrary view may be hard to present. Although we should not, despite Sunstein’s anxieties about the extent of public participation in the detailed process of risk management, lose sight of the fact that the public reaction to what appeared to be belated announcements about the discovery of dioxin contamination in food in Belgium, was amongst other things a reaction to what was widely perceived to be a calculated decision to keep the public in ignorance. Sunstein’s conception of high-quality and appropriate deliberation about risk, deliberation that takes place in the absence of those whose interests and welfare are under discussion, may seem to be a contradiction in terms. However, if social cascades and moral panics threaten the quality of public decision-making, then those who wish to exclude the public also need to be aware of the possibility that social cascades and moral panics will be fuelled by actions, even wellintended actions, by risk communicators and managers that treat the public, if not the public interest, as peripheral to the process of risk regulation itself. What seems uncontentious is that deliberations about risk and food safety need to be better informed not only about the technical aspects of particular risks, such as those that arise from such things as dioxin contamination, but about the relationship between such risks and the structure of the modern food economy. It is far less certain that Sunstein’s general argument, about the strength of the case for keeping the public largely at the margin of risk politics, will prove to be either wise or practicable.

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Dioxin The New Scientist and the public understanding of risk and science In its remarkable coverage of the Belgian dioxin scandal the New Scientist magazine set out to offer insights and provide an informed perspective on risk in simple and direct language; an approach that was essentially unmatched elsewhere. The magazine’s Deborah MacKenzie wrote that she found the ambivalence of the Belgian public easy to understand. Belgian people were angry at their government’s failure to issue immediate warnings but were well aware that the release of dioxins was not the government’s fault and that there was no obvious way of determining what the impact of dioxin on their health had been and would be in the future. The limited ability of the authorities to make sound judgements about the damage that had been done and the mortality and morbidity that was to come was not something that could be corrected easily, quickly or inexpensively. The public, by and large, in Belgium and elsewhere, understood that increased levels of public safety generally come with a substantial price tag and depend on expertise and information that is not readily available to government or the public at large. In the immediate aftermath of the dioxin contamination it had proven difficult to explain to the Belgian public, or indeed the public in any part of the world, that the release of dioxins into the environment and contamination of food with dioxins was not explicable in terms of any single event, however shocking. The need for work to measure both the background levels of dioxins and releases from particular events thought likely to endanger public health, by threatening to contaminate or actually contaminating the food supply, was something that simply could not be explained or, more important, addressed successfully in the midst of a great national crisis. The possibility, indeed the likelihood, that there are features of the food economy that substantially increase the likelihood of dioxin contamination is something that needs to be explained carefully over a long period of time. If the general public, with an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of cooking and the preparation of food, can appreciate the many different qualities of food and ways of preparing it, it ought not to be judged unreasonable to assert that the appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of a modern food economy can also be much better explained and more widely understood. From MacKenzie’s point of view one of the most worrying aspects of the dioxin release in Belgium, and the consequent food contamination and ingestion of carcinogens, was the impact that dioxin and other POPs had had on the most vulnerable members of society. The New Scientist had made a very simple and obvious point, a point that is surely central to public deliberation about the regulation of food safety. If the accumulation of POPs takes place over 139

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Food, risk and politics very long periods of time and acts in ways that are extremely hard for vulnerable individuals to detect then it needs to be studied consistently over a long period of time. The ability to make secure and informative measurements over long periods is something that is primarily dependent on government action and that necessarily entails choices, which are best made in ways that do not depend on any single headline or on the level of public outrage at any particular government. In its editorial, entitled ‘Recipe for Disaster’, the New Scientist wrote not only about the science but also about the risk of politics of dioxins and PCBs in food (NS, 1999). The New Scientist was in no doubt that what had happened in Belgium was simply and straightforwardly a: consequence of a large-scale, fast-throughput, competitive industry that keeps us in the West … well supplied with cheap food. Large-scale integration means efficiency, but [it] also [means] that a single mistake can spread right across the system. (NS, 1999)

Those characteristics of the modern food economy are every bit as relevant and salient to public discussion of food safety regulation as the undoubted existence of social cascades. Well-informed public decision-making not only needs to address the possibility, indeed the reality of social and availability cascades, it also needs to address the problems of probability neglect and even more obvious forms of neglect: neglect of important aspects of any risk regulation regime aimed at maintaining and enhancing food safety. To do this in a way that has any prospect of commanding public support requires that the public are involved and consulted about the full range of issues that need to be addressed – and the costs and opportunity costs of public action and inaction. We can all understand that it is easy to blame others when outrage is the strongest emotion that we feel. We can all understand that outrage is a poor guide to a safer future and that policy may change little even if policy makers are changed, unless other things change at the same time. Kicking one lot of public-policy makers out and replacing them with another is most unlikely to contribute much, of itself, to the design or operation of a risk regulation regime. Rather, as the New Scientist editorial suggested, when reflecting on the Belgian dioxin affair: The bottom line is a food industry where innocent mistakes can happen on a massive scale and not be detected until too late … looked at [in this] way the Belgian fiasco is not surprising …

The New Scientist was certain that the Belgian authorities had a duty, in light of what had happened, to collect as much information as possible over a period of thirty years, so that ‘officials have some idea of the kind of doses people have 140

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Dioxin received’ and the health consequences of those doses. The ability to undertake continuous measurements of this kind, and to employ the analytical capacity to make sense of the data that are produced, requires a politics of anticipation and appropriate judgements about the need for precautionary steps. The greatest challenge in risk politics is to find a way of achieving a balance between precaution and reaction, in the knowledge that while this balance is vulnerable to social cascades, to waves of unreason and unreasonableness, it can also be determined in a way that is not only more deliberative but also more robust if it engages the public in ways and over periods of time that are not dictated by the most widely, dramatically and fleetingly reported risk events.

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7 Foot-and-mouth disease – who’s ­panicking now?

Outbreaks that take us all by surprise In April 1991 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) announced that foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) had been eradicated in Europe. The New Scientist reported its announcement as ‘good news for cows’ (NS, 1991). Though ‘good news’ for cloven-footed beasts and other farm animals, even when it appears in a respected science magazine and has come in the first instance from an international organisation responsible for concerting policy on agriculture and food between nations, rarely seems to be an unmixed blessing. The FAO announced, at the same time, that it supported the EU decision to suspend vaccination against FMD in Europe and favoured the creation a buffer zone for FMD which entailed moving the focus of the vaccination effort against the disease out of Thrace in Greece and into Asia Minor. Perhaps, some of those who read and heard these announcements might have been moved to ask: Is it possible, eventually, that the world could be rid of FMD in the same way that smallpox has been eliminated as a threat to human health? Unfortunately the global elimination of FMD still seems a long way off (Kitching, Hammond, Jeggo et al., 2007: 5660–5664). The reason for optimism amongst the experts at FAO and at the European Commission in the early 1990s about having rid Europe of FMD was that there had been no outbreak of foot-and-mouth in the FAO’s European section since July 1989; all twenty-eight countries which made up the European section had been certified free of foot-and-mouth. Britain’s last outbreak had occurred on the Isle of Wight in 1981, ten years previously. And, in the UK, MAFF was convinced that that disease outbreak had resulted from virus carried over, on the wind, from Brittany in France. Indeed, it was necessary in Britain’s case to go back to 1967–68 to find a major foot-and-mouth outbreak. The FAO considered Europe’s status as FMD-free could be taken as a vindication of the intelligent use of vaccination and the British regarded it as ­confirmation that 142

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Foot-and-mouth disease their uncompromising policy of slaughter was the right approach. In both cases it was accepted that keeping Europe FMD free would depend on how successfully the virus which caused foot-and-mouth could be kept out of Europe, by controlling imports that might bring the disease in from the many parts of the world where it remained endemic. The confidence of the FAO in the spring of 1991 now contrasts rather starkly with the foot-and-mouth crisis that swept Britain in 2001 and the FMD outbreak in Surrey that began in August 2007. This latter outbreak has subsequently been linked to a scandal over breaches of bio-security at a government research institute and a virus manufacturing facility at Pirbright in Surrey. Two reports published in September 2007, exposing extraordinary lapses in bio-security at the premises of the Institute for Animal Health (IAH) and at Merial Animal Health, confirmed that the foot-and-mouth virus responsible for the 2007 outbreaks of foot-and-mouth, had been released from the site shared by the IAH and Merial. The outbreaks were confirmed by the reports as self-inflicted wounds. The IAH is one of the world’s leading scientific institutes concerned with research into foot-and-mouth, the world’s FMD reference laboratory, and Merial is a commercial organisation responsible for the manufacture of vaccines against foot-and-mouth designed to protect cattle and other farm animals against the disease and, in the event of an outbreak, assist in preventing its spread. Both outbreaks in Britain, in 2001 and in 2007, have served to underline the extent to which animal health, food safety and risk politics raise issues that go far beyond the management of public anxiety and to the very heart of government risk management regimes and systems, upon which the public should be able to rely. Pyres across the nation In a remarkable piece of writing Martin Woollacott, a Guardian journalist, expressed the shock and disbelief that was felt across Britain in 2001. The outbreak of foot-and-mouth, which began in February 2001, traced to Heddonon-the-Wall in Northumberland, was not only remarkable for its extent but – above all – for the scale of the animal slaughter that accompanied it. The events that unfolded in the spring and summer of 2001 may have seemed unreal to all those who watched the spread of the disease and the incineration of thousands of animal corpses on their televisions but there was no mistake; government vets and the army had been asked to superintend the destruction of millions of cattle and other farm animals. Martin Woollacott himself referred to what he saw happening as ‘surreal’. What made the burning of the animal carcases so hard to believe, in Woollacott’s 143

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Food, risk and politics eyes at least, was that the government of one of the world’s leading and longest established liberal democracies had found itself in a position where mass ‘animal sacrifice’ was declared to be an inescapable part of its disease control strategy. This was a disease which, like many others, he was aware did not threaten human health and yet the destruction of millions of animals was taking place in circumstances where there was a great body of evidence and scientific opinion supporting the view that the outbreak could have been controlled by a judicious use of vaccination and a strictly limited use of animal slaughter. If, as has been argued in Chapter 6 dealing with the Belgian dioxin crisis, the general public had exhibited signs of panic and succumbed to a social cascade, it now seemed in Britain, at the beginning of 2001, that those upon whom it ought to have been possible to rely for calm and considered decision making about how to manage the outbreak, were caught up in something akin to a preenlightenment ritual intended to assuage public anxiety, cleanse the countryside and show who was in charge. Where, Wollacott seemed to be asking, was the evidence of a careful and fully informed assessment of the implications of the outbreak, an indisputably serious outbreak, of animal disease? Where was the evidence of rational planning to contain the disease, so that damage to the rural economy, the food economy and the national economy as a whole could be minimised? Woollacott wrote that the British government had been: reduced to animal sacrifice at the end of the 20th century … [and was] contemplating the mass slaughter of cattle not on scientific grounds but to restore public confidence … The extraordinary logic of doing something which you have explained in advance is not necessary represents a lurch into the realm of superstition. Like a Roman worshipper hesitating between temples, the government was thinking only in terms of propitiation … (Woollacott, 1998: 47)

Woollacott was convinced that the British government had failed to comprehend the British public’s readiness and capacity, if properly consulted, to support management of the outbreak of foot-and-mouth in ways that balanced costs and benefits intelligently and in line with the different risks that it posed. He wrote: if governments want peoples who are more understanding, they have to associate them, more directly and continuously, with the decisions which lead to risks being taken. Effective risk prevention cannot emerge out of the haphazard interaction between a science which will always hold out against absolute conclusions, an industry maximising production and profit, and a public opinion veering between greed and fear. Nor can the complexity of the decisions be reduced to a simple equation, with environmental consequences on the one hand and economic advantage on the other. The question must rather be: what kind of risks are we prepared to take in order to be the society we want to be? (49)

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Foot-and-mouth disease The scale of the problems and the scale of government failure When the National Audit Office completed a report on applying the lessons learnt from the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001, almost four years after the outbreak had begun, it reported that: In 2001, [Defra] estimates that at least 57 separate farms were infected before the disease was first reported. The resulting epidemic was one of the largest and most costly animal disease outbreaks ever. At least 6 million animals were culled for disease control purposes or because of welfare problems resulting from restrictions on animal movements. The 2001 epidemic cost the taxpayer over £3 billion, including some 1.4 billion paid in compensation to culled animals. (NAO-Comptroller and Auditor General, 2005: 2)

Others have offered higher figures for both the numbers of animals slaughtered and the financial losses incurred (NS, 2003; NS, 2002b and NS, 2007a, where numbers of animals slaughtered were put at ‘between 6.5 and 10 million at a cost of more than £8.5 million’). There can be no doubt that there was a hugely adverse impact on the rural economy generally, with incomes from tourism being dramatically cut for many months in 2001 and damage to the rural economy from which there was little hope of recovery. The economic blow extended well beyond farming and the social and psychological impacts of the foot-and-mouth outbreak and of the government’s control measures were huge, even if they remain well beyond precise calculation. The 2007 outbreak, which will also be considered in some detail below, also raises important questions about the ways in which those who are generally considered to be best placed to manage risk behave, both in times of crisis and at times when they might be expected to keep risks under continuous review and to ensure that policy and regulatory actions and systems are carefully scrutinised and continually improved. Foot-and-mouth – the disease and its control Foot-and-mouth disease is one of the most infectious livestock diseases. As few as ten virus particles can cause the disease in cows (NS, 2001). It is caused by a virus known as Aphthovirus or Aphtae epizooticae. The disease is also known as hoof-and-mouth disease. Animals that are susceptible to it include cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, deer and other cloven-hoofed animals. Rats and hedgehogs are also susceptible and, even though horses, dogs and cats are not, they can easily spread the virus by carrying it in their hair. The infectivity of foot-and-mouth disease is so great that it is estimated that almost 100 per cent of susceptible animals, once exposed to it, will become infected. The virus spreads easily in 145

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Food, risk and politics contaminated animal feed or water and on such things as shoes or clothing and farm equipment. The virus can also be carried by the wind from farm to farm though there is reason to believe that the ease of wind-borne transmission varies between the different forms of the virus. The infectivity and the ease with which the virus can be transmitted from place to place means that not only is its presence likely to be very quickly apparent when cattle and pigs are infected but that the risk of transmission, beyond the animals that are infected, is exceptionally high unless affected animals very quickly cease to be a repository of infection. The normal incubation period for the disease is between three and eight days and transmission from one animal to another is likely before infection has first been identified by those caring for the animals at greatest risk. The problem of critical delays in identification and reporting of infection are likely to be exacerbated during an outbreak by the fact there is a good deal of uncertainty about how long the virus can survive and remain infectious in different conditions and mediums, such as in soil, and continue to pose a disease threat to farm animals (Spratt, 2007: 18). There are important differences between the ways in which animals that are susceptible to the disease are affected by it. For example, when pigs are infected they are known to release anything from 40 million to 400 million infectious virus units per day. On the other hand, sheep often present a severe diagnostic problem because they are more likely to have less severe clinical signs of infection and recover better than other cloven-hoofed animals; nevertheless, they can remain a source of infection to other animals, even though they do not release anything like the number of infectious virus units as pigs do. In the 2001 outbreaks in Britain references to the ‘silent spread’ of the disease reflected the extent to which the transportation of sheep over great distances, enabled the virus to spread throughout Britain without detection. The reluctance of the authorities to impose immediate and stringent controls on animal movements, which might have limited the spread of FMD and the scale of the epidemic, will be discussed later in this chapter. Animals that have been infected with foot-and-mouth disease exhibit fever and suffer from blisters in the mouth, on teats and on their feet; blisters in the mouth which result in drooling and virus release, something that is a notable feature of the disease. Blisters on the feet are prone to rupture, increasing the risk of virus spread at the same time as causing lameness. Infected animals have difficulty eating and moving and are likely to suffer serious weight loss. Adult animals may take a long time to recover from the disease, up to several months, though most animals, if left to recover, will do so. Foot-and-mouth disease can cause significant damage to heart muscle and this is a cause of death from the disease, particularly in newborn and young 146

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Foot-and-mouth disease animals. Despite the highly contagious character of the disease human beings are rarely affected and only a very small number of human infections with foot-and-mouth have ever been confirmed. Human consumption of meat from animals with FMD does not present a direct health threat to humans. The disease agent/pathogen Foot-and-mouth disease is caused by a virus that has been described as ‘highly variable’. There are seven known serotypes (and a great many variants or subtypes within those serotypes). This means that it is possible to distinguish between forms of the virus which occur to a greater or lesser extent in different parts of the world. The virus responsible for the outbreak of foot-and-mouth in the UK in 2001 was the ‘Type O pan Asian’ strain of the disease. The form of the virus that was found in the 2007 outbreaks, known as ‘01BFS67-like’, is a variant of the virus responsible for the 1967 foot-and-mouth outbreak in Britain, which has been the focus of a great deal of laboratory work including work by vaccine producers. The particular characteristics of the different forms of the foot-and-mouth virus and the immunological response of infected animals can be important when regulatory and control authorities seek to establish the cause of any particular outbreak and need to consider the likely routes by which animals have become infected. Classification of virus types may also be relevant in considering what disease control strategies, including vaccination, should be adopted. The speed with which it is possible to diagnose FMD, itself an important consideration for the control authorities, depends on the means of testing that is employed. The ability, in areas where vaccination has been employed as a method of control, to distinguish between infected animals and those animals that have an immunity resulting from vaccination, is dependent on the capacity of laboratories to discriminate between the immune responses of infected and vaccinated animals. This is a matter of some significance in determining what control strategies it is appropriate to pursue and in evaluating the benefits and costs of vaccination. Much of the public controversy over the use of slaughter in the 2001 outbreak in Britain centred on the practicability and long-term implications, particularly economic implications, of using vaccination in combination with slaughter, as opposed to relying on a slaughter policy alone. Vaccination – a thorny issue During the course of the 2001 FMD outbreaks in Britain the case for and against vaccination became the single most important fault-line between those 147

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Food, risk and politics who supported the government strategy of control by slaughter and those who believed it was deeply flawed. Paul Kitching, head of the Institute of Animal Health at Pirbright in Surrey at the beginning of the outbreak, pointed out that no one should be under the misapprehension that vaccinating animals would guarantee that they were disease-free. He told the New Scientist that: ‘where animals harbour the live virus, exports of vaccinated animals or produce … could still spread the disease to livestock in other countries’ (NS, 2001). The New Scientist was told by another member of the IAH staff, Alex Donaldson, that where vaccination had taken place it might not be possible to export animals for up to two years: a fact that many believe has had an enormous (and disproportionate) influence on public policy in the UK. Despite the very serious doubts of British experts that vaccination could be made to work in a way that would satisfy British farmers and control authorities there has been a good deal of information released about work on vaccines that may reduce the need for slaughter without compromising vital control measures or affecting the ability of farmers, in the short or medium term, to export what they produce. In 2001, as the scale of the outbreak of FMD grew, the New Scientist carried a series of stories about the development and possible use of vaccines against FMD. Subsequent reports have suggested that vaccines could meet a number of the requirements of farmers and control authorities; but more sophisticated vaccines remain under development and progress appears very slow. Marvin Grubman, based at the Palm Island research facility in New York, claimed in 2001 that new vaccines were in production that could work better than conventional de-activated copies of the foot-and-mouth disease virus. The research he was involved in held out the prospect of vaccinating in a way that made it possible to distinguish between animals that had been vaccinated and animals that were carrying the live FMD virus. But vaccines, even new vaccines, were acknowledged to have considerable disadvantages that would not be easy to overcome. Re-vaccination was likely to be needed every six months to maintain resistance and different vaccines were likely to be needed to protect against different serotypes of the FMD virus and to protect different animals. In 2002 the New Scientist reported on progress in developing a synthetic vaccine that has ‘triumphed in its first full trial’. Alex Donaldson, head of the IHA, described the work as ‘a step forward and very encouraging’ (NS, 2002a). But the rate of advance in work of this kind is dependent not only on investment in research and progress in the laboratory but also on the commercial opportunities that are likely to be available when a new vaccine has been developed. In another report in the magazine, one of its leading reporters, Andy Coghlan, who had followed FMD during 2001 most closely, provided readers with a list of essential and desirable characteristics for any FMD vaccine that aimed to 148

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Foot-and-mouth disease command wide support. In doing so, in an edition of the magazine published in July 2002, he was combining reflection on the properties of a possible future FMD vaccine with consideration of the conclusions that had emerged from recently published reports on the 2001 FMD outbreak and its management by the British government (Coghlan, 2002). There appeared to be a consensus that vaccination had a great deal to commend it and should form a part of any future government strategy to control FMD outbreaks. Such a strategy would be greatly helped if an FMD vaccine: • • • • • • •

Gave protection against all seven FMD viral strains Gave a lifelong protection against FMD Was cheap and easy to administer Could be stored to use without refrigeration Did not risk causing the disease Allowed efforts to differentiate between vaccinated and infected animals Could pass on protection against FMD to suckling infants

The chances of developing a vaccine combining all these attributes in the near future is slim but the prospects for combining some of the most important and desirable characteristics is likely to be dependent on the amount of funding and support given to vaccine development and the scientific research on which it depends. One particularly critical issue, therefore, in considering the use of vaccination in controlling FMD and in investing in the development of FMD vaccines is the willingness of countries that have been FMD-free for long periods to support the development and use of vaccines in parts of the world where FMD remains endemic. A global control strategy – looking beyond national boundaries The possibility of a global control strategy was considered by Mark Rweyemamu and Vicente Astudillo in 2002, and Paul Kitching and others in 2007. The optimism and enthusiasm so clearly evident in the presentation of the case for a global control strategy, in which vaccination could be expected to play a major part, is unmistakable in the work of Rweyemamu and Astudillo. Paul Kitching and his colleagues, representing the five leading international centres for work on FMD, writing five years later appear considerably less optimistic. Not only do they identify a number of important scientific questions and enigmas that still need to be addressed but they point a vital requirement for long-term projects to combat FMD. Long-term projects ‘require funding and commitment’. They conclude their review of the prospects for global FMD control with the observation that: 149

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Food, risk and politics It did not take long for the panic of the 2001 FMD outbreak to be replaced by concern for other emerging diseases, and a consequent re-direction of financial support (Kitching, Hammond, Jeggo et al., 2007: 5664).

Understanding of FMD and advances in the science needed to develop vaccines are clearly not matters for specialists in animal diseases alone; the issues raised by FMD should concern risk regulators and the general public they serve. The panic over FMD that Kitching and his colleagues believe had created intense public interest for a while, in 2001, had not been sufficient to increase support for scientific work in the longer term to a level that matched the threat that FMD continued to represent around the world, especially in the parts of the world where the disease remains endemic. What it had done, in Britain, was intensify criticism of the Ministry, MAFF, which had overall charge of animal welfare. Outbreak, crisis and failure at the heart of government: the 2001 outbreak Criticism of MAFF’s role in the 2001 outbreak of FMD was widespread and deeply felt and it grew almost from the moment that the first suspected case of FMD was reported from an abattoir in Essex on 19 February 2001. Criticism not only led to the ministry losing responsibility for coordinating the government effort to manage the FMD epidemic but to its abolition before the year was out. MAFF was replaced by a new Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in June 2001. In order to understand why a ministry, which might have been expected to provide most of the government’s expertise in veterinary and agriculture matters and guide the nation’s response to FMD was sidelined, it is necessary to understand just how profoundly the epidemic undermined confidence in its skills and leadership. The difficulty that MAFF faced, almost from the very beginning of the epidemic of FMD, was that it was not only seen to be failing to manage the crisis on Britain’s farms but appeared hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the wider ramifications of the disease outbreak. FMD threatened the whole of rural life and rural communities everywhere and the failure to contain it had undoubted ramifications for the whole of British society. In the first month of the crisis, as the disease spread across Britain, FMD remained the lead story in the nation’s newspapers and on television news bulletins. Instead of MAFF’s initial actions containing the outbreak – which they had been expected to do – and instilling confidence that it was an alien disease which could be quickly quarantined and removed, the rapid acceleration in the numbers of farms affected appeared to admit only one interpretation: FMD was out of control and it was the ministry that had lost control. One of the inquiry reports, prepared by Iain Anderson 150

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Foot-and-mouth disease at the government’s request – known as the Lessons to be Learned report – concluded that: ‘The logistical machinery for dealing with the epidemic was inadequate to the task’ (Anderson, 2002: 79). That machinery, such as it was, was controlled by MAFF and MAFF faced insuperable problems. The ministry simply hadn’t anticipated an FMD outbreak that could evade its long-established policy of stamping out. The last major outbreak had occurred over thirty years previously and there had been little in the way of new contingency planning since. The lack of any systematic and critical review in MAFF plans amounted to an assertion that what had worked before would work again. However, by the time MAFF became aware of FMD in 2001 it was faced with the task of managing not one but more than fifty outbreaks of FMD in widely dispersed locations. Unbeknown to the Ministry, FMD had, by late February 2001, already been spread widely by the transportation over long distances throughout the UK of infected sheep; sheep that did not display the symptoms of FMD as clearly as cattle and pigs. The make-up of Britain’s livestock had changed dramatically since the last great outbreak in 1967 – something that, in the absence of contingency planning, the ministry simply wasn’t equipped to deal with. Crucial days were lost when a national ban on the transport of animals could and should have been introduced but wasn’t. The initial lack of understanding about how the disease was being spread and the failure to introduce an immediate ban on the movement of animals meant that the ministry, which had been directed to make savings by reducing what was regarded as an excessively large professional staff, did not have the capacity to trace where infected animals had come from and where they had gone to. The State Veterinary Service had suffered substantial cuts between 1969 and 2001 with the number of veterinary officers being cut from 597 to 286 (HoC, 2001). The staff MAFF now found it desperately needed – to oversee testing for FMD and implement its long-established policy of slaughter – were simply not available. Although there had been criticisms of MAFF for not maintaining the veterinary staff numbers needed to deal with a major outbreak of animal disease the ministry had chosen an easier course: to bend to Treasury pressures rather than to fight them. It had appeared expedient to make savings by cutting staff who, it was believed, would only be needed in the rare (even inconceivable) event of a serious prolonged disease outbreak. MAFF had assumed that it would be able to stamp out any outbreak of FMD and limit spread by acting speedily when the first case was identified. In the event that immediate identification of the origin of an outbreak was not possible and the ministry found it was committed to a strategy that could not possibly work without a plan B. Its lack of resources was quickly exposed as the number of separate cases of FMD rose during March 2001. By the end of 151

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Food, risk and politics March, when the disease was at its height, more than fifty new suspected outbreaks were being reported each day. The seriousness and fundamental nature of the ministry’s lack of understanding of the problems it was faced with were revealed early in March 2001, when the Secretary of State for agriculture was interviewed on television. He was asked whether he believed the disease was under control and replied that he was ‘absolutely certain’ that it was (Campbell and Lee, 2003: 432). There is no need to doubt the honesty of the Secretary of State; his reply was one that almost certainly rested on briefing materials provided by senior staff in his ministry. MAFF’s increasingly obvious incapacity and its failure to control FMD by a limited and carefully targeted campaign of stamping out had by the end of March become plain for all to see. Just over a month after the initial outbreak, with the Prime Minister planning to call a general election to coincide with the local elections at the beginning of May, the responsibility for managing the epidemic passed from MAFF to the Cabinet Office Briefing Room, to what has become known as COBRA. What had seemed, at least to begin with, to be an agricultural crisis had become a quintessentially political one. COBRA is the ad hoc committee that is convened by central government to deal with what are deemed to be national emergencies. It coordinates government action to deal with such things as major terrorist incidents, other threats to public order and safety, and natural disasters. The kind of animal health problem that MAFF had been expected to be able to deal with unaided had become, it seemed, five weeks after the first suspected case of FMD, a national crisis that could only be managed under the leadership of the Prime Minister and his chief scientific advisor, Professor Sir David King – two key players able to command resources drawn from right across central government. COBRA adopted a policy of precautionary slaughter. The strategy of stamping out the disease in tightly defined localities, in order to contain the spread of the disease, had been transformed into a policy of mass animal slaughter. It was no longer a question of stamping out the disease by culling cattle and other infected animals when infection had been confirmed by laboratory tests. Waiting for the results of laboratory tests introduced an unacceptable delay. It was decided that it was necessary to destroy farm animals that might become infected in order to create a kind of disease firebreak around all the premises where animals were believed to be infected. The policy, known as contiguous culling was very liberally interpreted, and dramatically increased the number of cattle, pigs and sheep that the government insisted should be destroyed. The legislation under which the Secretary of State responsible for agriculture had the power to have animals destroyed almost certainly did not supply the legal authority needed for the emergency precautionary policy of contiguous culling. David Campbell and Robert Lee, in their review of the government’s ­strategy 152

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Foot-and-mouth disease following the defenestration of MAFF, refer to carnage by computer. The title of their article is based on a quote from a West Country veterinarian, Mrs Wendy Vere. The vet observed: Their idea [referring to the government] was to control the disease by culling in contiguous farms. That is absolutely fine if you are sitting in front of a computer screen in London. However, it is different on the ground. A person in London will just see the numbers and will say that they have to be taken out. That is why it was carnage by computer. (Campbell and Lee, 2003: 435)

Calling in the ‘A’ Team – panic mode or power mode? When the men from the Ministry, that is MAFF, had been pushed aside, another group of experts, with expertise in epidemiology and disease modelling, were engaged by COBRA to devise a strategy that could bring the epidemic under control. They did so with the full authority of the Prime Minister and his Chief Scientific Advisor. Given the urgency that the government attached to controlling spread of FMD, not least the need to prepare the way for a general election, and uncertainties about such things as the airborne spread of the virus, the assumptions underlying the epidemiological modelling were almost certainly more pessimistic about spread than they needed to be. But the transition from MAFF coordination to COBRA was expected to make a decisive difference and the policy of contiguous culling was driven by a Prime Ministerial imperative to produce results quickly after lamentable MAFF failures at the beginning of the outbreak. Campbell and Lee conclude that the strategy adopted meant abandoning ‘stamping out … in all but name’ and replacing it with a strategy of ‘mass, almost indiscriminate killing’ instead (2003: 436). The leader of a group involved in the modelling work is reported as having commented: ‘in the crisis … it was unfortunate [but the ‘blunt tool’ contiguous culling was] … the only tool available’ (Uhlig, 2002). Campbell and Lee suggest that up to 90 per cent of the animals destroyed may not have been infected with FMD (2003: 438). Iain Taylor has summed up the government’s approach to the 2001 outbreak of FMD as ‘policy on the hoof ’. Another name for it is: policy by panic response. The government response in the wake of MAFF’s failures has also been described as a ‘policy disaster’. The things that contribute to a policy disaster are said to include ‘scale aggregation, overly speedy policy-making, political hyperactivism, the arrogance of Whitehall and ineffective executive checks and balances’ (Taylor, 2003: 542). One close observer of the British political scene, Patrick Dunleavy, has suggested that the UK may be particularly prone, among European states, to ‘policy disasters’. 153

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Food, risk and politics That proneness may reflect the possibility that public-policy makers, particularly those who choose to fly solo, may be just as vulnerable as the public they serve, to over reactions to shocking events. No doubt this reflects aspects of human perception and psychology that we all share and that are unlikely to be held in check in the absence of arrangements for policy making and for the shaping and review of regulatory regimes that are genuinely open, deliberative and well-informed. If the public can be easily misled, because it falls prey to such things as the availability heuristic, probability neglect and social cascades, it may not be alone. Public-policy makers, under great pressure and facing severe embarrassment, determined to meet what are perceived as the most pressing political imperatives, may be equally vulnerable. Despite repeated requests to use vaccination as part of its FMD control measures the government remained unmoved. The official rejection of vaccination attracted more sustained criticism from the numerous inquiries, whether officially sanctioned and supported or not, than any other aspect of FMD management in 2001. The fixity of purpose and inflexibility of the government’s control strategy suggested that there had been a limited capacity to learn and adapt during the epidemic; hardly a surprise, given COBRA’s starting point. The government’s response to the various inquiry reports after the event unequivocally stated that things would be different in future but, when the 2007 outbreak – a very different event – came many of the same characteristics that had attracted criticism in 2001 and 2002, when reports such Iain Anderson’s Lessons to be Learned and The Royal Society’s Infectious Diseases in Livestock were published (advocating the use of vaccination as part of any future control strategy), seemed to be on display. Some of those criticisms were openly or implicitly directed at expert cultures that found it difficult to accept criticism; something that is illustrated in the next section. Other criticisms were directed at seemingly more mundane aspects of regulation, which often prove to be critical in containing and learning from crises. The fashioning of regulatory regimes and the means employed in reviewing and improving them is also a matter of very great importance and one that can be profoundly affected by the attitudes and culture of experts who are reluctant to admit or acknowledge mistakes and who operate, most of the time, well away from public gaze. Repeated mistakes – will they never learn? Two reports, dealing with the release of foot-and-mouth virus from the Pirbright site of the Institute of Animal Health (IAH) and Merial Animal Health in 2007 – to which I now turn – illustrate that very well. One former senior employee at the IAH, Andrew King, who was called back in the crisis of 2007 to help 154

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Foot-and-mouth disease examine the escape of foot-and-mouth virus from the Pirbright site, summed up the unwillingness of staff, working at a prestigious and internationally recognised institution, to contemplate the possibility that they might have been at fault. Dr King, who was reported in the Daily Telegraph as having been ‘called in to investigate whether the virus had escaped from the research plant’ had, it appeared, quickly concluded that ‘sabotage was the only explanation’ (Malkin, 2007). Dr King was reported to have gone further in presenting his initial conclusions and assessment: As far as I am concerned the authorities have failed to find any chink in the armoury of the establishment by a-security. What you are left with is human movement, which is not a matter for the institute, it’s a police matter. It’s very, very unlikely that it could be spread by accident. People do not spread the disease easily. (Malkin, 2007)

Having failed to find a ‘chink in the armoury’ Dr King continued: [No] single measure is absolute but together [bio-security measures] make it impossible for the virus to get out and it never has got out in the modern era. (Malkin, 2007)

The account of what had happened at Pirbright that was provided by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and Professor Brian Spratt, just under a month later, told a very different and sobering story. The 2007 FMD outbreak had come from the release of foot-and-mouth virus from the Pirbright site. The likeliest explanation of the release of the virus pointed to very serious failures of bio-security which could and should have been anticipated long before. As the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota explained, perhaps with the advantage of being able to comment at a safe distance on what had happened at the site of the world reference laboratory for the FMD virus, the British had ended up in blaming a leaky drain for the foot-and-mouth outbreak (CIDRAP, 2007). The HSC and Professor Spratt had found that effluent from the commercial vaccine production facility, run by Merial, containing the foot-and-mouth virus had been discharged into a drainage system that had been damaged by tree roots. Complete decontamination of wastes at the site of the IAH and Merial was known to be hard to achieve and the possibility that waste materials entering the drainage system could contain sufficient live virus to transmit FMD should have been recognised. The need to renew the drainage system and ensure that it was fit for purpose was something that had been recognised for at least four years. It was estimated that the cost of repair was in the order of £50,000 but discussions between Merial and the IAH appeared to have delayed the start of work to upgrade the drainage system. When the HSE and Professor Spratt reported, it became clear that there had been serious lapses in security and works to the drainage system that had 155

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Food, risk and politics been outstanding for some time. Commenting on the independent reports on bio-security and the release of the virus the president of the National Farmers’ Union, Peter Kendall, was reported as saying that he found the shortcomings at Pirbright ‘indefensible’. He continued: I find it well-nigh incredible that standards should have been as lax as these reports appear to reveal, given that those concerned were handling some of the most dangerous animal viruses on the planet. (Daily Mail, 2007a and b)

Mr Kendall went on to say that his union was talking to lawyers about the possibility of suing on its members’ behalf for compensation. Professor Spratt, in his report, noted that the drainage system had been ‘poorly maintained and was rarely inspected’. He went on to note that ‘there is some evidence of a culture of complacency about safety at the Institute of Animal Health’. It appears most likely that construction vehicles leaving the Pirbright site, which were not subject to any process of disinfection, picked up contaminated soil and distributed the FMD virus on roads in the area surrounding the research and vaccine production facility. The virus that was deposited by these vehicles may then have been carried on the wheels of other vehicles into the affected farms and started the outbreak. While those working at Pirbright, whether for the IAH or Merial, must accept a good deal of responsibility for the release of the virus and the failure, over an extended period, to deal with an obvious weakness in bio-security, delays in providing the funding needed to equip the Institute with the premises it needed to undertake repair and upgrading work point to failures at the heart of central government. It is ironic that builders engaged in £120 million upgrade of the Institute almost certainly carried the virus out of Pirbright on the tyres of their lorries, after storms in July which overwhelmed the drainage system, and allowed live virus in effluent from Merial and IAH to contaminate the soil above the fractured drainage system. As Christopher Hood, Henry Rothstein and Robert Boardman have argued in their book, The Government of Risk: Understanding Risk Regulation Regimes (2004), it is sometimes essential in studying risk management to employ the political science equivalent of a microscope rather than to reach for the telescope. Examining the very fine detail of a risk regime often reveals things that will be missed by someone whose attention is focused on the grand panorama and the structure of government. In the case of FMD it seems that it is necessary to combine a study of the culture and outlook of those who have had the most influence in Britain’s long-standing policy of FMD, control by slaughter, with a careful study of the entrails of the risk regime which has been fashioned and maintained over many decades. In what follows, readers will find a discussion that directs their attention both to the historical roots of the expert culture (and 156

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Foot-and-mouth disease an outlook that has shaped FMD control policies in Britain) and to the case, advanced by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, for rigorous questioning of the role that expertise plays in risk regulation and public-policy making. Woods and the ‘manufactured plague’ Abigail Woods, the author of A Manufactured Plague (2004a), leaves her readers in no doubt that British public-policy makers charged with the control of FMD had choices and have never been impelled by science towards the policy that has long since been adopted by the veterinary authorities in Britain: that policy has relied exclusively on the immediate destruction of animals infected with FMD. In her remarkable historical account of FMD, which traces the control strategy adopted in Britain over almost two centuries, she shows that the preference for animal destruction and rejection of alternatives, including isolation and vaccination, is deeply rooted in an outlook and a veterinary culture that viewed British veterinary expertise as paralleling imperial excellence and superiority in other fields. British vets expected to be acknowledged as the pre-eminent advocates and exponents of standards in the management and control of animal diseases that they believed could and indeed should have been adopted around the globe. After an intensive study of FMD lasting four years at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at Manchester University, which took her back through the documentary record of FMD control and veterinary interventions in Britain to the 1830s, Abigail Woods concludes that ‘FMD did not have to become a feared disease’ (2004a: xiv). Its fearsome status, she concluded, was directly attributable to the methods chosen to control it. The choices made in Britain by ministers, officials and British veterinarians meant that no room was left for compromises or for balancing the interests of livestock farmers against one overriding objective: the total eradication of FMD from Britain and from those countries with which Britain traded. That goal had been chosen for political and economic rather than veterinary reasons. The commitment to the pursuit of disease-free status, which came to dominate FMD control policy in Britain, meant that vets working for government could not be permitted to give any quarter in their management of animals that harboured the disease or in their dealings with livestock owners. Time and again this had placed the control authorities and their veterinary agents squarely in the opposite camp from farmers and livestock owners, for whom destruction of livestock frequently threatened financial ruin and often resulted in the destruction of their way of life. 157

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Food, risk and politics Faced with FMD the British state had decreed a remedy which extracted an enormous price from livestock farmers unfortunate enough to have their flocks and herds visited by the disease. The price or sacrifice they needed to make was one they had been told repeatedly would be made for the common good. Woods’s argument is simple to understand, though it relies upon an impressive body of historical research, historical reasoning and insight and considerable political intelligence. The definition of the common good, in terms of national freedom from FMD and maintenance of a robust national barrier against FMD, ultimately depends upon the acceptance of a very particular view of national prestige and the national economic interest. Regardless of how often the idea of the common good is framed in this way, whether it is presented as common sense or the expression of simple necessity, it announces a goal that is quintessentially political rather than veterinary or scientific. This is what justifies – in Abigail Woods’s mind at least – her choice of language, her description of FMD as ‘a manufactured plague’. The FMD epidemic of 2001 threw a veterinary strategy that had its roots deep in the history of Britain into sharp relief. The choice of an uncompromising policy of animal destruction, not only failing to achieve the objective of quickly stamping out FMD but entrenching a method of animal disease control that could only be pursued at an extraordinarily high economic, social and psychological cost. The losses not just to livestock owners and breeders but to the whole of the rural economy became apparent beyond rural communities in a way that had never happened previously. Those who ordered wholesale animal slaughter found that they were being held responsible not only for great cruelty and unparalleled waste but also for the enormous collateral damage that an uncompromising campaign of animal destruction did to all those whose livelihoods depended on access to the countryside and on the continued flow of farm produce. The list of aggrieved parties turned out to be a long one and included: butchers, auctioneers, dealers, hauliers, importers and exporters of meat and livestock, members of the tourist trade and all those members of rural communities who depended directly and indirectly upon them. If a policy of slaughter has both costs and benefits and is justified to the general public because its benefits outweighed its costs it may seem reasonable to ask: Have the costs been calculated with sufficient care and do they take full account of all the interests that have been affected, including the many interests affected beyond the farm gate? Those, like Abigail Woods, who were far from certain that an uncompromising slaughter policy made veterinary, economic or social sense, were increasingly inclined to ask searching questions, once doubts arose about the underlying strength of the case for a policy that rejected everything except animal slaughter. If the case was weaker than had previously been supposed then political judgements about how different objectives should be 158

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Foot-and-mouth disease weighed were no longer constrained in the way that the British veterinary establishment and the National Farmers’ Union had supposed. The refusal of the authorities, responsible for managing the 2001 FMD, to contemplate anything other than slaughter, became a dogma pursued in the interests of one group among many. Aspects of agricultural policy and the food economy that had seemed to be off limits to members of the government who had not been directly concerned with farming were no longer the exclusive terrain of experts. An area of public policy that had been presented as an expert domain had lost that exclusive status and, in the process, it had become much harder to keep the public out. Can you really trust the experts? Risk: everybody’s business? In discussing our use of, and reliance upon, expertise Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber make a powerful case for discriminating between experts who can clearly demonstrate their independence and are willing to rely upon scientific reasoning, and those who rely on their status as experts, rather than rational argument and evidence in communicating beyond their immediate circle. In opening their book, Trust us, We’re Experts! (2002), on ‘how industry manipulates science and gambles with your future’, Rampton and Stauber share their hard-won knowledge of the methods employed by corporations and government agencies, to influence public opinion. In commending what they call ‘the smell test’ they relate the story of one of their original encounters, as founders of the Center for Media and Democracy, with a government agency that had decided to adopt a public relations strategy to advance a policy proposal it felt unable to promote in any other way. The organisation concerned was the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It sought public acceptance, or acquiescence, for the use of sewage fertiliser. Public distaste for the agency’s proposal was viewed as irrational by the EPA and based upon ‘the widely held perception of sewage sludge as malodorous, disease causing or otherwise repulsive’ (Rampton and Stauber, 2002: 1). The agency had come to the conclusion that it was necessary to give sewage sludge a new name: it would, henceforth, be known as biosolids. This would help pave the way to public acquiescence in its use in agriculture. It was a proposal that Rampton and Stauber believed failed their ‘smell test’. The EPA’s resort to euphemism was itself evidence that it could not sell its proposal without the aid of tactics designed to circumvent public discussion. The EPA’s strategy was premised on the use of propaganda techniques, including euphemism (part of what others call spin and economy with the truth), which Rampton and Stauber concluded had been designed to undermine democratic accountability, ­infantilise 159

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Food, risk and politics and ultimately exclude the public. Rampton and Stauber’s criticisms of the use of propaganda is an important part of the case they make against an array of techniques that have been developed, particularly in the United States, to manage public opinion. It is a key part of the case they make for accountable and deliberative government. They believe that the misuse of expertise, including expertise employed in the manipulation of public opinion, dramatically reduces the chances that risk politics will be conducted openly and democratically. The two media watchers provide their readers with a series of entertaining and revealing case studies highlighting the multifarious ways in which expert opinion is misrepresented and manipulated in order to obfuscate and frustrate public debate rather than to facilitate it. The ability to question authority – ­including the authority of experts – depends not only on being able to identify the techniques of propagandists and the illegitimate use of emotional triggers, it also depends on the public’s willingness to demand that experts openly acknowledge uncertainties and communicate their knowledge and beliefs in language that can be widely understood. While many of the issues that experts are called upon to present to a non-scientific audience require the communication of a specialist’s knowledge, public interest in them is unlikely to be purely scientific or technical. The complex issues, some of which have been referred to in this chapter, raised by a policy of FMD control that anticipates the combined use of vaccination and slaughter, cannot reasonably be discussed in isolation from the ethical and economic questions that permeate agricultural policy and almost every aspect of the modern food economy. It is essential, if the public is to understand and have a real say in how public resources are used to ensure the safety of what it eats, the way in which public resources invested in the rural economy are managed and how farm animals are treated, that those who have specialist knowledge share their knowledge in ways that makes clear its relevance to important questions of public policy. The skills needed to do this without spin and the reasonable expectation that experts will not only be able but free to share what they know with the general public are both important parts of the fabric of a democratic society; the kind of a society in which risk politics can be conducted maturely and not as the plaything of commercial or party political interests. Risk regulation regimes: the subject of an intense and specialist study The FMD outbreaks of 2001 and 2007 have raised important questions about the general conduct of risk politics in Britain and the fine detail of risk 160

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Foot-and-mouth disease r­ egulation regimes. Hood, Rothstein and Baldwin, in their study of risk regulation regimes (2004), commended an approach to the study of risk that balanced the considerable academic effort devoted to understanding the relationship between modernity and risk perception, led by writers such as Ulrich Beck, with the effort devoted to explaining the variability of risk regimes in different parts of the world. What did they mean by risk regulation regimes? They were referring to ‘the institutional geography, rules, practice, and animating ideas associated with the regulation of particular risks or hazards’ (Hood, Rothstein and Baldwin et al., 2004: 9). The ways in which the same or similar hazards were managed in different societies, even societies that were similar in most other respects, led to striking differences in the management of risk. There is no difficulty in providing examples to illustrate this general proposition. A challenging regulatory environment, for growers of GM crops in Europe, can be contrasted with a relaxed regulatory environment for GM crops and the use of GM ingredients in food in the USA. Cyclamates are permitted and saccharin banned in Canada while the reverse is the case in the USA (2004: 5). An undoubted willingness to use vaccines to control the spread of FMD in parts of continental Europe can be contrasted with fierce resistance to anything other than slaughter in the UK. The precise modalities of risk regulation regimes are reflected in what Hood, Rothstein and Baldwin refer to as a ‘generic trio of components’ found in risk regulation regimes around the world (14). That trio encompasses what they call policy making, monitoring and behaviour modification. The relevance of their analytical framework cannot be doubted in studying the outbreaks of FMD in Britain in 2001 and 2007 and the inquiries established to investigate and report on them. In both instances post-mortems, in the form of official and unofficial inquiries, set out the shortcomings of regulation and disease control. While this chapter has focused on vaccination as a method of FMD control, it is important to acknowledge that it is but one of many possible issues that could have been used to illuminate the catastrophic failure of risk regulation in Britain in 2001 and the flaws, in terms of policy making, monitoring and behaviour modification, that continued to pervade FMD risk regulation in 2007. Whatever the focus it is safe to say that over-confidence and misplaced confidence in some critical parts of government and lack of accountability in most parts of government have been constant features of the FMD story in Britain. The vulnerabilities of public perception and response to risk, so often the focus of our attention, have parallels in official circles, which also needs to be acknowledged and closely studied.

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8 Conclusion

Risk politics, choice and food We have choices about the kind of risk politics (including food safety politics) that we get. Readers of this book, most of whom will be citizens of liberal democracies, can pursue and define their interests as consumers, as voters and as members of civil society. Simply talking to family, friends and neighbours and to colleagues at work connects us to a network of public opinion and influence that is regularly probed by those who govern our society, sell us all manner of goods and services and, no small matter in the complex risk politics of a liberal democracy, are paid to communicate with us about hazards and their regulation. Many of those communicators are employed by organisations that are exceptionally well-equipped to relay news and a vast range of other information. They also have the capacity, should they choose to and should we want them to, to involve us much more deeply in what they do. So far as the modern food economy is concerned, the willingness of retailers to respond and adapt to consumer preferences should not be underestimated. European consumers’ distrust of GMOs – however unreasoning that distrust may appear to be to the scientific community – has elicited an unmistakable response from major food retailers throughout Europe: they don’t knowingly sell products with GM ingredients. Modern government is geared up to recognise and respond to public anxiety about food and invests heavily in order to do so. Just consider the public investment in food safety inquiries and in governmental responses to their findings. The mass media are also attentive to public opinion and have become increasingly engaged in reporting our views about food and food-related issues. Just consider the number of press and television reports and documentary programmes in the last decade that have dealt with issues covered in the case study chapters of this book; and then consider the range of culinary expertise that is now routinely provided for our entertainment and education. Nevertheless, many of the public and private choices 162

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Conclusion about food and food policy that may come to readers’ minds appear to be very heavily constrained by factors over which our personal influence seems to be vanishingly small. Indeed, only some – perhaps a very small subset – of the choices that are available to us in a modern food economy, can truly be described as purely personal. While the ways in which we buy, store and prepare food, all seem – at first sight – to offer most of us who live in the wealthy liberal democracies of the EU and North America, a considerable range of personal choice, that impression is misleading. While our apparently personal choices appear to influence the commercial and political strategies of major retailers and of public-policy makers they – the retailers and public authorities – are extraordinarily well placed and well resourced to influence us, making the true weight of our relative influence on them, and theirs on us, hard to determine precisely. And, when risk politics comes to the fore, we tend to signal what we fear rather than what we want. The salmonella, BSE, GM and dioxin case studies leave little room for doubt about that. Indeed, even the domain of supposedly purely personal decision making seems, on closer examination, to be much more restricted than we might have supposed. In the case of the major food scandals, scares and crises discussed in this book, the risk politics of the food economy has been shaped by happenings that give every appearance of being well beyond our control; by events which very few of us could have predicted, most of us found it difficult to fully comprehend, and in which we couldn’t reasonably have expected to have played a constructive role at the time. Our common experience, in the wake of great risk events, might reasonably be summed up as that of bystanders, anxious but unable to act, apart that is from reacting to our own anxieties (anxieties we almost certainly shared with many others). Is this experience simply a reflection of our distance from the centre of events and of an underlying powerlessness that consumers, even citizens and consumers in liberal democracies, must simply accept? Do we have any realistic prospect of influencing or being involved in making choices about food-related risks, either before, during or after the shocking episodes that have erupted into and disrupted our politics and our food economy since the late 1980s? Can we play any part, let alone a constructive part, in determining how the food economy of the future will work? Can we hope to understand its ramifications for the way in which we live, the agriculture on which we depend for our food, or the shape of risk politics to come? Can we have a say in the risk politics upon which we might reasonably suppose the future quality and safety of our food depends? The chief claim made in this concluding chapter is that we do and we can. However, in order to exercise a greater degree of choice than we do now, as consumers, electors and members of civil society, we need to be much more 163

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Food, risk and politics prepared and much better equipped to act with our fellow citizens to shape risk politics. We – or others who share our social and economic position – need to be involved in risk politics at as early a stage as possible; involved in much more sophisticated forms of anticipatory and deliberative risk politics rather than the reactionary politics of risk that has been the hallmark of food scares, scandals and crises over the last two decades. At almost every point in what follows, the arguments and the information presented have been chosen with the objective of answering a central question in contemporary risk politics: How can the interests of millions of individual consumers, about the risks that permeate every aspect of the modern food economy, be more carefully considered and weighed with greater seriousness, not only by society’s most prominent and influential risk assessors, communicators and managers but also by consumers themselves (or those who can reasonably claim to speak on their behalf )? Similar questions have been posed by many different writers and thinkers who have set out to survey the political and cultural landscape of contemporary liberal democracies. Many of them have been motivated by a desire to determine whether risk politics can be made more participatory and deliberative (Rothstein, 2004), or by an impulse to wrestle with the many difficulties that are likely to be encountered in the search for a truly democratic and deliberative risk politics (Hiskes, 1998a and b; Beck, 1999: 14–18; Goodin and Dryzek, 2006). Others, such as Dick Taverne (2005), have been disturbed by what they view as the public’s susceptibility to panic and how to combat it. What is to be done about a public that is – it is claimed – easily duped and all too often frightened? Taverne fears that a march of unreason threatens both the science and the democracy on which our prospects for a safer and a better world depend. Frank Furedi (2005) has similar concerns. He asks whether the politics of fear, exemplified in public reactions to phenomena as varied as terrorism and food-borne infection, threaten to overwhelm and infantilise the whole of our politics. Ulrich Beck, the author of the seminal Risk Society (1992), offers another and strikingly different vision of how risk politics must be recast in the modern world, if we are to have any real prospect of making the management of risk both democratic and effective. In his World Risk Society (1999) Beck presented The Cosmopolitan Manifesto, a successor to The Communist Manifesto. His modern manifesto ‘is about transnational-national conflict and dialogue’ and Beck insists that it addresses the need for and ‘the possibility of democracy in a global age’ (1999: 14). Modern risks can only be addressed, he argues, by self-consciously global citizens. In view of this it is no surprise that Beck calls on the citizens of the world to unite in order to become the managers rather than the victims of modern risks (1999: 18). While theorists such as Furedi and Beck direct our attention to the possibility and desirability of cultural, social and individual transformations – as 164

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Conclusion a ­precondition for refashioning risk politics – others, such as Paul Slovic and Cass Sunstein, present more obviously realist and realistic perspectives. They focus attention on what social science has been able to establish about human risk perception and, most especially, the differences between the evaluations and risk assessments of experts and the general public. Both are also keen to explore how best the interests of millions of citizens can be served by risk communicators and risk managers in liberal and democratic societies. How should the undoubted differences between citizens, whose perceptions of risk may be characterised as unbalanced and ill informed, be served by experts whose judgements are (we must hope) better informed and less prone to distortion by such things as the availability heuristic and probability neglect? Sunstein’s clear preference is for a risk politics in which the role of deliberator is reserved for those who are insulated from the bounded rationality of the ordinary consumer. Slovic and many of those with whom he has worked most closely express a strong preference for forms of risk politics in which the values of the public, however difficult that may be to organise, are given great weight. Both points of view will be considered in this chapter. The work of another set of academics and researchers, and of risk practitioners, will also be examined here. Their approach to questions about enhancing and strengthening risk politics is predicated on a detailed examination of the institutional arrangements for public participation in risk politics. What, they ask from the perspectives of many different stakeholders, are likely to be the optimal methods for presenting information, balancing different and sometimes rival interests, and considering alternative courses of action? Many of them are political theorists and academics with a special interest in risk. They include Richard P. Hiskes, Henry F. Rothstein, Albert Weale, Robert Goodin and John Dryzek (1998; 2004; 2002; 2006). All have been attentive and assiduous students of the practice and theory of risk politics. And they have been joined by practitioners (risk assessors, communicators and managers), who share a commitment to exploring the ways in which risk managers and experts may be able to work more closely with stakeholders, particularly those whose interests may often have been neglected and poorly represented in the past. The work of some of these practitioners has been associated with specialist government agencies charged with risk regulation. In the UK that includes such bodies as the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) – which took the lead in coordinating reflections on risk analysis, risk communication and management in central government in the late 1990s; and the Food Standards Agency (FSA), a key player in the risks politics with which this book is most directly concerned, which was established in 2000. When the HSE published an initial discussion document on its decisionmaking processes in 1999, it explained that it had done so because there was 165

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Food, risk and politics legitimate public concern about how to strike the ‘balance between the health and safety measures introduced to eliminate or control risks, and the costs arising or benefits forgone when [such] measures [were] introduced’ (HSE, 2001: v). It accepted that it had a duty to set out the philosophy underpinning its decision making. Its public discussion document, which invited and received a substantial number of stakeholder responses led to the publication of Reducing Risks, Protecting People, in 2001. In fact Reducing Risks was one of a series of official publications that appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s intended to make risk politics in Britain more transparent and accountable. The HSE took on the leadership of an interdepartmental group that drew participants from across central government. The group was known by a somewhat uninviting title: Inter-Departmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment (ILGRA). ILGRA was established to provide risk assessors and regulators at the heart of British government with a forum in which they could try and ‘secure coherence and consistency within and between policy and practice in risk assessments undertaken by Government’. ILGRA was succeeded by a team working on risk within the Cabinet Office’s Strategy Unit. Its report, ‘Risk: Improving Government’s Capability to Handle Risk and Uncertainty’ (Strategy Unit, 2002), has become one of a series of substantial and impressive publications and initiatives. These include the developing role of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) in the Cabinet Office; the establishment of the Better Regulation Task Force; Philip Hampton’s review of regulation (2005) and the establishment of a Better Regulation Commission. All of this work has confirmed the place of risk politics at the core of contemporary modern British government and helped to make risk communication and management one of the most carefully considered aspects of contemporary governance. Beyond the UK it is possible for students of risk politics to consult the work of other practitioners, including specialists who advised and worked for the European Environment Agency (EEA) and risk regulators in North America. The EEA was responsible for a remarkable publication, The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings (2001/2002). It presented an expert review of precaution in European risk politics between 1896 and 2000 and is a beacon study of the faltering application and refinement of one of the most controversial concepts in risk politics. The perspective offered by the EU’s EEA can be considered alongside the general advice on risk communication issued by the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The ATSDR Primer on Health Risk Communication appears on its public website. While the Primer is there for all to see it is presented as ATSDR’s advice to its own staff and co-workers about how risk communication can be undertaken in a way that respects the public that ATSDR exists to 166

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Conclusion serve. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), which published Risk Communication for Government – Theory and Application for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in 2001, explained that it had done so in order to draw together the information it believed it needed to ‘improve the CFIA’s overall risk communications strategies and activities’. CFIA is one of a growing number of risk management agencies around the world that have demonstrated an enthusiasm for critically examining and informing their own practice in the light of risk communication research and theory. Its publication is one of many that illustrate the important role that interaction between risk researchers, academics and practitioners now plays in risk politics. The range, quality and quantity of theoretical and empirical work on which it is now possible for students and practitioners of risk politics to draw can hardly fail to impress. It has grown rapidly since the late 1980s. But, before returning to consider some of that work and its relevance to the questions posed earlier, it is necessary to revisit the case studies presented earlier in this book in order to identify and comment on some of the most important issues to have emerged and to consider their significance for risk politics in general and risk communication in particular. Cases and issues The complexity and political sensitivity of risk politics has grown substantially and altered radically in the course of the twentieth century, particularly in its closing decades. Food politics has been no exception and, in many respects, it can be said to have led the way. In the case of the salmonella scare, discussed in Chapter 2, the intense media interest attracted by a ministerial statement just before Christmas 1988, took both ministers and their officials by surprise. It seems that many of those involved in policy making at the heart of British government had little understanding of just how substantially changes in the food economy had affected their ability to fashion policy consensually and behind closed doors. Even though the shift, from what Martin J. Smith labelled a policy community to an issue network, had taken place over more than a decade, members of the food policy community had failed to appreciate its significance for the way in which they transacted food policy. They appeared equally unaware of critical changes in the way in which news coverage was organised and the implications for their work of a highly competitive media market in news presentation. A philosophy of public-policy making, which treated the public and public opinion as incidental and mostly irrelevant to risk politics had failed to adapt and changed remarkably slowly, even after Edwina Currie’s rapid departure from the government at the end of 1988. Confirmation of just 167

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Food, risk and politics how difficult ministers and their officials found it to change their spots came when Lord Phillips elicited the following observation from the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Robert May, in the course of the BSE Inquiry: You can see the temptation on occasion to wish to hold the facts close so that you can have internal discussion and the formation of the consensus so the simple message can be taken out into the marketplace (Phillips, 2000: Para 1297, Vol. 1).

May, who had become the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser in 1995, went on to say that he thought the temptation should be resisted but added that his preference for openness was likely to mean that: ‘the full messy process whereby scientific understanding is arrived at with all its problems has to spill out into the open.’ (Para 1297) The messiness is something that risk assessors, communicators and managers working for government have found deeply troubling. It has meant, as R. B. Foster, an official who worked with the risk assessment policy unit in the Health and Safety Executive in 2000 explained, that government risk regulators have been expected to become ‘aware that they will not be seen to manage risk successfully unless they earn the trust of their stakeholders’ (Foster, 2000: 3). While being found to have held facts close can easily undermine trust, greater openness undoubtedly complicates the business of risk regulation and makes winning and retaining public trust both trickier and riskier. Unfortunately, for public sector risk regulators, identifying and managing all the factors that enhance trust simultaneously is exceptionally difficult. If, as R. B. Foster claimed, trust in governments and experts depends on developing ‘more coherent, comprehensive and equitable approaches for evaluating, comparing and managing health and environmental risks’, (3) risk regulators clearly needed a raft of new skills and a willingness to engage in activities that had not previously been part of their job description. Of course independent and respected expertise can be called upon to negotiate the rapids of media attention and public opinion. In the case of food scares, scandals and crises government has attempted to enlist and deploy such expertise with increasing frequency to bolster its authority and maintain its credibility. As Hugh Pennington’s account of his work as the leader of an inquiry team into the E. coli O157 outbreak in Scotland in 1996 demonstrates, high-quality disaster science can quickly and (surprisingly) cheaply (in the case of the inquiry he led) pinpoint regulatory failings. It can also supply the detailed recommendations needed to improve safety and enhance the management of risk. In Pennington’s case his inquiry team came forward with recommendations – most particularly the full implementation of the food safety system Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP). Pennington’s recommendations, as he freely acknowledged, were neither new nor radical. 168

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Conclusion However, while the rapier of an inquiry could expose serious shortcomings it could not counter, at least unaided, the inadequacies of a regulatory regime that was under-resourced, poorly managed and badly motivated. Risk politics will be ill served – by even the best led inquiry – if inquirers are disqualified from addressing the basic shortcomings of an established regulatory regime or commenting directly on the implications for risk management of a deregulatory philosophy driven by economic and partisan considerations. Risk regulation regimes that are poorly aligned with the activities they are expected to regulate are problematic for reformers. That was precisely what Richard Schofield and Jean Shaoul found to be the case in their study of the meat industry. While the industry had undergone dramatic change the regulatory regime that was supposed to ensure its safe operation had not. Conflicts of interest in the meat industry as well as in government, over enforcement of such things as the Specified Bovine Offal regulations and funding for the meat inspection service, meant that meat inspection and abattoir supervision had been rendered less effective. Risk regulators, denied the resources and the authority they needed to do their work, were in an unenviable position. When called upon to serve more than one master – and Schofield and Shaoul suggest that this is precisely what was expected of the meat inspection regime in the mid-1990s – even the best disaster science cannot be expected to compensate for entrenched shortcomings in practice and inadequate funding. The proposition that well-informed risk politics needs to devote at least as much attention to the health and operation of risk regimes themselves as it does to the regulatory philosophy that underpins their work is one of the most important lessons to emerge from the case studies presented in this book. One case study stands out from the others as exemplifying the fragility of public confidence in risk communication and regulation. It is the case study concerned with BSE and vCJD. It is also the case study that most clearly illustrates what can go wrong inside government in the management of foodrelated risks. Academic accounts of the policy disasters and regulatory failures in the management of BSE/vCJD highlight the dangers of ‘independent’ risk assessors being absorbed into and, as a result, compromised by the government machinery by which they have been engaged. In their study BSE: Risk, Science and Governance Patrick van Zwanenberg and Erik Millstone (2005) pinpoint a critical failing in the scientific advice that MAFF and the DoH were given in the late 1980s, when the extent of precaution that was thought to be necessary in response to the discovery of BSE was first being determined. The Southwood Working Party, which had been set the task of advising government about the risk that BSE posed to human health, produced its report for MAFF and DoH in February 1989. The report concluded that it was ‘most unlikely that BSE will have implications for human health’ (Southwood, 1989: 21). 169

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Food, risk and politics Nevertheless, the Working Party acknowledged that if this judgement was mistaken ‘the implications would be extremely serious’ (21). The Working Party’s greatest scientific difficulty was that it lacked a scientific basis for offering any estimate of the transmissibility of BSE to humans, let alone suggesting that the risk of transmission was low. Put bluntly, the degree of uncertainty was such that it could not offer a credible risk assessment. A simple extrapolation from the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) in sheep, known as scrapie, which had not – so far as anyone knew – been transmitted to humans, meant the approach it adopted could not be justified scientifically. While it might appear reassuring to conjecture that what was true of scrapie would also be true of mad cow disease the Working Party lacked an evidence base to support such a conclusion. In giving advice the Working Party allowed itself to become enmeshed in the world of agricultural policy making and public opinion management from which, as scientific experts, it might have been expected to keep its distance. Millstone and van Zwanenberg draw attention, in their exceptionally carefully researched and detailed study, to comments made by members of the Southwood Working Party who gave evidence to the Phillips Inquiry into BSE. In the evidence they gave it was accepted that: There was no, or virtually no scientific knowledge concerning BSE available at this time. We worked on the basis that scrapie was the most likely cause of the BSE epidemic; we had to base our advice on the science relating to scrapie at the time. (van Zwanenberg and Millstone, 2005: 113)

Van Zwanenberg and Millstone are surely correct to question this assertion about the advice that was given. They suggest that members of the Working Party believed that they had a responsibility to give advice that would help ministers and officials and to avoid giving advice in a way that could make the lives of ministers and officials more difficult. Indeed, one member of the Working Party explained, in evidence to the Phillips Inquiry, that: [the] use of the word ‘remote’ [in relation to the possibility of BSE transmission to humans] was done on purpose, because the consequences [of doing otherwise] … could have been quite disastrous if the public at large had been alarmed by this. (Phillips Report Evidence, 2000: BSE Inquiry Transcript, 21 July 1999, Day 106, 65)

When independent experts adopt such an outlook it cannot be doubted that they risk undermining the independence and the integrity of the scientific advice they are able to give. Once scientific advisers believe that they have an obligation to support those who have the difficult job of managing a crisis they cease to be in a position to present the unvarnished truth. When third parties, including the general public, suspect that independent experts have taken it 170

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Conclusion upon themselves to present their views in ways that avoid adding to the troubles of those who have commissioned them, the rules of engagement in risk politics are changed forever. The notion that expert advice stands or falls on the expertise of those who have given it is forfeit. The asymmetry principle, introduced and discussed towards the end of the BSE case study in Chapter 4, focuses attention on the ease with which trust in government can be destroyed and on the difficulties of re-establishing it once it has been lost. When scientific advisers, who are represented as being independent and as uncompromising in the way they give their advice, are bracketed with the public-policy makers to whom they have given their advice, the loss of trust is likely to extend well beyond risk managers and communicators; indeed there is likely to be lasting damage to public confidence in risk regulation as a whole. In the case of BSE – in the words of the Phillips Inquiry – a policy of sedation was pursued until the CJD unit in Edinburgh presented its assessment of the transmissibility of BSE to humans in 1996. Millstone and van Zwanenberg’s description of the part that the CJD Surveillance Unit played in the development of policy contrasts sharply with their account of the Southwood Working Party and its relationship with ministers: The existence and competent operation of the CJD Surveillance Unit was … a critical institutional condition for the collapse of MAFF’s BSE policy and narrative at the end of the third week of March, 1996. (van Zwanenberg and Millstone, 2005: 229)

The independence of experts advising government is one of government’s greatest political resources but, like trust in risk managers themselves, once it is gambled in a high-stakes game, where retaining public support in the short term and avoiding panic is the chief prize, its loss may prove irrecoverable. The public distrust and suspicion that remained after the BSE/vCJD announcement by Stephen Dorrell in Parliament in 1996 meant that there was especially fertile ground in which public doubts about GMOs could take root. As Chapter 5 on GMOs explained, there was no signal or single event, scandal, scare or crisis that focused public attention on GMOs in the way that salmonella in eggs, the Wishaw E. coli outbreak or the announcement that BSE was the probable cause of vCJD had done. However, the absence of any evidence of harm to human consumers from food containing GM ingredients has not inhibited critics of what has been labelled ‘Frankenstein food’. It was and it appears to remain a case of guilt by association; the association of GM science with enterprises that appear to care for little other than market position and profitability. On the other side of battle lines that have been drawn between anti-GM campaigners and GM advocates, a similar logic – based on guilt by association – appears to apply. For example, despite obvious differences between GM protestors and the tyrants with whom they have been compared, 171

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Food, risk and politics there has been little sign of restraint in associating them with the most reviled of historical figures in an attempt to discredit them. The characterisation by Lord Robert May, former President of the Royal Society and a pre-eminent member of the British scientific establishment, of GM critics as fundamentalists who threatened the entirety of Enlightenment values appeared to give an establishment seal of approval to the sweeping dismissal of virtually all criticism of GMOs as unreasoning. As Guy Cook’s analysis – in Genetically Modified Language – of Lord May’s 2002 address to the Royal Society makes plain, Lord May chose to lump critics of GM science together with the Taliban, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung: fundamentalists all. The President of the Royal Society used his presidential address to explain that the world was divided into two camps: those who understood and respected the methods of scientific inquiry and those who rejected them. It is hard to resist the impression that the use of such a rhetorical device runs the danger of associating the thoughts of Lord May with those of President Bush, however unfair that may appear to be. Whether they came from East or West the rejectionists were undoubtedly authoritarians who threatened scientific progress. Opponents of GM should be counted amongst those who disavowed the questioning outlook that lay at the core of science, of Western civilisation. The fundamentalists marked themselves apart because they rejected experimentation as a means for resolving disputes. Cook concludes, and he is right to do so, that Lord May had chosen to rely on: … argument by analogy, in which one shared feature (acting on a-priori rather than evidence based-beliefs) is used to link peaceful advocacy with violent imposition. (Cook, 2004a: 33)

Acceptance of the proposition that advocating values, which cannot meet the strict requirements of the experimental method, should be treated as disqualifying critics of GM from being taken seriously is tantamount to arguing for the exclusion of almost everyone who is not a scientist, from deliberations about the application and pursuit of scientific knowledge. It is a proposition that appears to define the boundaries of legitimate argument about science and technology extraordinarily restrictively and, in a liberal democracy, quite unreasonably. The impression that the political establishment shared Lord May’s view that ordinary members of the British public could only expect to have a say about the future of GMOs if they listened carefully to the scientifically informed arguments of GM proponents and then accepted them, as framing public debate, was, unfortunately, confirmed rather than dispelled by GM Nation? Although this interesting innovation in public consultation had a great deal to commend it, it reinforced the impression that serious 172

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Conclusion discussion would, only very reluctantly, be permitted to become a two-way affair. Risk politics is, of course, about far more than science; while the capacity to understand the science upon which GM is based is highly desirable it is unlikely to be sufficient to settle many of the disagreements that have shaped both the public and the scientific debate about the use and development of GM technologies. The political potency of food scares was confirmed in 1999 by the reaction of the Belgian public to the revelation that Belgian poultry and eggs had been contaminated with dioxin. The fact that a food scare had the potential to become a social cascade that was itself capable of decisively influencing the result of a national election made a deep impression across the European Union. It not only underlined the importance of food safety policy in the member states of the Union but supplied much of the additional impetus needed for the European Commission to carry through its plans for a comprehensive reform of European food law. It assisted the European Commission in realising its goal of creating a new European agency, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) (now based in Parma, Italy), to oversee the development of a common evidence base and methodology for establishing the science that underpinned food safety policy. The volatility of public opinion and the acceptance and political significance of academic insights into the formation of popular opinion had helped to reinforce the view that a substantial investment in assessing, communicating and managing risk was required if public confidence in European food safety systems was ever to be re-established. A number of those academic insights had come from the combination and integration of the psychometric paradigm, developed by Paul Slovic and his colleagues, and the cultural theory of risk developed by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky. The product of that combination was the Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF), which also considered, in accounting for the panics and cascades that were deeply troubling to liberal democracies, the role of the mass media. The political imperative to manage public perceptions of risk more successfully ran parallel to a common economic objective: avoidance of further disruptive, expensive and divisive dislocations to the European food economy. Acceptance of the need for publicly funded bodies, with a clear mandate to communicate directly – and independently of the rest of government – with the public about food-borne threats to human health and welfare, became a part of the policy portfolio of every EU member state. New food safety agencies could be presented as evidence of government determination to learn from the triple shocks of BSE, public rejection of GMOs and the rapid and stunning electoral retribution of Belgian 173

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Food, risk and politics c­ onsumers for dioxin contamination found in their nation’s food. The UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) was established in 2000; Belgium’s Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain (FASFC) began its operations in 2002; in Germany The Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) was established in November 2002 ‘as an agency under public law to strengthen consumer health protection’; in France Agence Française De Sécurité Sanitaire Des Aliments (Afssa) has been in existence since April 1999, working closely with the French ministries for health, agriculture and consumer affairs to assure French consumers that food is safe. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) now lists on its website food safety agency partners in each of the EU’s member states with strikingly similar histories and remits. If the rapid establishment of food safety agencies throughout the Union, similar in design and purpose, can be taken as evidence of the determination of national leaders to communicate their strength of purpose and commitment to food safety, Britain’s experiences with FMD in 2001 and 2007 prompted questions about the competence of public authorities as managers of the modern food economy. In this case it was expert advice and the risk regulation system itself that became a major concern for elected representatives and the mass media, rather than the fickleness of the public. The lack of contingency planning that was evident in 2001, as MAFF failed to act decisively to control the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, undoubtedly produced an overreaction to FMD. UK central government adopted an uncompromising policy of mass slaughter directed from within the Cabinet Office, rather than MAFF. The FMD epidemic showed that government – not just the public – could be disoriented by a crisis in the food economy. If public reaction to news of salmonella in eggs in 1988, and to news of dioxin contamination in 1999, offered little in the way of guidance to those wishing to design or redesign the risk regulation regime for the long term, it is tempting to make a similar observation about the British government’s response to BSE and the FMD epidemic. The failures of official risk communication, following the identification of BSE in cattle in the 1980s, and the unbending rejection of vaccination throughout the entire course of the FMD epidemic in 2001, suggested that government had been as ill-prepared, in the face of major crises affecting the food economy, as the public had been – and just as easily panicked. Officialdom, not just the public, appeared to find it difficult to keep its balance in the midst of a food scare or an animal health crisis. Perhaps there are common elements in the difficulties that both government and the public seem to have experienced in the face of food scares and crises. When unanticipated happenings demand an urgent response little time is left for reflection. The expectation that those in charge of food safety and risk regulation will demonstrate their mastery of events, even when 174

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Conclusion events take them in a direction they had not been expecting, may lead – understandably perhaps – to impulsive and disproportionate action. The insistence on mass slaughter and unwillingness to seriously consider vaccination, which attracted so much criticism both during and after the 2001 FMD epidemic, is an example of reactionary rather than anticipatory risk politics. The public, of course, has not generally been asked or expected to anticipate; the public simply reacts. And, while the public reacts, ministers, officials and their advisers, we hope, will cope. Such a view implies that reaction – rather than anticipation – in public responses to food crises is something, however regrettable, which should be viewed as unavoidable on some occasions. However, it also implies that risk regulators can and should do more to plan ahead. The establishment of food safety agencies and public involvement in their work provide opportunities to do this as well as representing a major shift in public policy. It suggests that governments have accepted that the public should no longer be treated simply as bystanders in the operation of the modern food economy. The battle of the bulge, the growing importance attached by public health campaigns to engaging the general population in managing its own nutrition, signals an acceptance on the part of public authorities that the long-term management and reduction of food-related risks is everybody’s business. It is an important development that could and should, and indeed is (perhaps grudgingly and far too slowly), being generalised. Taverne, Furedi and Beck on risk and risk politics If finding ways to win the public’s trust occupies the minds of legislators and risk regulators there are others who have grave doubts about whether the public is ever likely to be truly trustworthy. It’s an odd and even a perverse doubt in a liberal democracy, and most especially for a Liberal Democrat. But it is the doubt that is expressed by Dick Taverne in The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism (2005). Taverne’s thesis is not difficult to grasp: there is widespread (and quite possibly growing) public distrust of science and scientific experts. Taverne traces a good deal of public distrust of modern science to the development of nuclear weapons. He acknowledges that public anxiety about the uses to which scientific knowledge may be put has been accompanied by calls for greater public involvement in setting scientific research agendas and risk management. However, Taverne is puzzled about the way in which a general optimism about science has given way to popular anxiety and pessimism; not least because he credits science and technology with all manner of good things, including many that have enabled human beings to 175

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Food, risk and politics live longer and healthier lives. Science may still be widely respected but it has come to be feared by many at the same time: A highly articulate section of opinion, strongly represented by comments in the press, expresses a profound malaise about the direction in which science is going and wants the public to have more control over what science does. (Taverne, 2005: 25)

Despite his puzzlement Taverne does attempt an explanation for public suspicion of science. Beginning with public anxiety about nuclear power, he finds that popular concern about the impact of science and technology on the environment has grown enormously; something that can be attributed to ‘the influence of environmental pressure groups’ and for which they must shoulder much of the blame. Environmental pressure groups have been able to exploit ‘a feeling that science is out of control because of the speed of change’. While he acknowledges that powerful new technologies can be misused, Taverne deplores what he regards as the public’s unwillingness and inability to make balanced assessments of the potential benefits flowing from such things as genetic research. It is all too often, he concludes, the opinions of those who have limited scientific understanding, rather than the scientists who have the deepest knowledge of scientific research and innovation, which appear to have the great influence on public opinion. The public’s receptivity to the anti-science and anti-technology messages of environmental pressure groups reflects, in Taverne’s view, an utterly disproportionate reaction to isolated and exceptional events; events that have profoundly shaken public confidence in the management of new technologies. The Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) nuclear accidents and the release of chemicals from a plant in Seveso in Italy (in 1976) and gas from a plant in Bhopal in India (in 1984) have all been used to create the impression that modern technologies have made the world a much more dangerous place. Although he does not make his case in terms of the asymmetry principle, Taverne appears to be convinced that in making their pitch against scientific progress and technological innovation, environmental pressure groups have been exploiting, for the most part dishonestly and illegitimately, accidents that have left a deep impression in the public imagination. Indeed, Taverne relates how strongly he was affected when he first read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. He calls her account of the impact of agricultural chemicals on the environment one of the most influential books of the last century: She conjured up a most eloquent doomsday scenario of the consequences of the indiscriminate use of insecticides: a landscape in which no flowers bloomed, no birds sang, and the rivers were devoid of fish. (Taverne, 2005: 29)

However, in Taverne’s opinion, Rarchel Carson and other campaigners, such as the consumer champion Ralph Nader, have been responsible for the 176

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Conclusion creation of a popular anti-science movement characterised by its readiness to exaggerate dangers and ignore the benefits that flow from scientific research. Environmental campaigners, in particular, have been prepared to generate high levels of public fear and anxiety in order to obtain popular support for their rejection of science and the political leverage needed to obstruct scientific and technological progress, while ignoring benefits that have far outweighed the costs and risks of science and new technology. Over-reaction and misrepresentation of science have distorted public perceptions of it and led, in Taverne’s opinion, to the growing popularity of such things as homeopathy and organic food, despite the unscientific claims that are made for them. He is moved to declare: Ever since Prometheus … gave mankind the gift of fire, we have played with fire. What is different today is that a climate of pessimism and risk aversion has developed so that many people seem to wish that Prometheus had never bestowed his gift … fear about the direction in which science is taking us leads many people to hanker for the past, for the days before the birth of modern science when we were closer to nature and trusted in nature, because nature knows best. (2005: 35)

Despite this, Taverne believes that science and reason can be reconciled with democracy and he argues that, in the end, democracy will not fall victim to unreasoning popular fears. However, the reconciliation he proposes is far from convincing. He begins his account of the reconciliation of popular opinion, liberal democracy and science with two cheers for democracy. E. M. Forster cheered democratic society because he believed democracy allowed variety and permitted criticism. However, Taverne himself appears uncomfortable with the possibility of popular debate shaping public policy towards science, technology and risk. He quotes, no doubt for humorous effect but also with approval, Jonathan Swift’s observation that: ‘the bulk of mankind is as well-equipped for flying as for thinking’ (Taverne, 2005: 251). Indeed, he goes on to point out that many of his fellow citizens are as likely to be governed by their horoscopes as they are by the precepts of the scientific method (252). And it is clear that Taverne does not believe problems with democratic deliberation stop with the public’s lack of aptitude for reasoned argument. He decries the superficiality of modern political communication, including its reliance on soundbites, abuse of opponents and negative campaigning. So what might make it possible to reconcile democracy with reason and science? If Taverne’s general argument about the sensationalism of the press is accepted it will not be the press or the rest of the mass media. Even though he states that he believes ‘politicians are mostly decent people’, with some ­‘outstanding in terms of their intelligence, integrity and courage’ (254), it isn’t the qualities of elected representatives that lead him to put his faith in ­democracy. The 177

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Food, risk and politics ability of democracies to find a secure place for reason and for science lies, he believes, with those whose propensity to panic and reject science first motivated him to write his book. In the end it is – despite all he has written about public fears and unreason – the good sense of the voters: Even when full account is taken of misrepresentation through the media, pandering to prejudice, emphasis on personality and [the] less attractive features of election campaigns, issues raised in elections are generally, in a very rough and ready way, judged by voters on the evidence [emphasis added] (255).

Taverne, having lamented the ease with which the public has been panicked by exaggerated and ill-informed accounts of scientific research, rests his case for democracy and science on a very thin form of democratic engagement in which, to use his words, in a rough and ready way, the public – at least a majority of the electorate, despite the many shortcomings of the political system itself – turn out to be ‘quite sensible about many of the decisions that affect them directly’ (256). In truth Taverne fails to look beyond Forster’s two cheers for democracy to consider the role that a variety of opinion and open criticism might play in the popular deliberation of science and risk. If democratic societies, which allow for variety and permit criticism, are threatened by ill-considered and unbalanced arguments about science, technology and the costs and benefits of risk taking, it seems there is, nevertheless, some wisdom amongst the masses that can somehow be relied upon to guide the political system. The process which allows that to happen remains (so far as Taverne is concerned) mysterious and largely unaided by public debate. It is a process that seems remarkably content-free; essentially empty when compared with the scientific method, which Taverne so greatly admires. Taverne’s faith in democracy rests on the ineffable good sense of the mass of people. He concludes the public has the ability to behave ‘quite sensibly … about decisions that affect them directly’, although he cannot explain why this should be so. If science progresses because of an open exchange of views and peer review, it is tempting to ask why something similar could not play an important part in shaping public opinion. Is it possible that public deliberation can be developed and enriched as part of a scheme to strengthen democracy? However, like Lord May, whose Royal Society Address was alluded to earlier in this chapter, Taverne concludes his discussion of reason, democracy and science, by likening opponents of GM science and technology – and others whose views he finds have been at odds with mainstream scientific opinion – with religious fundamentalists. The disdain that Taverne expresses for the mass of his fellow citizens, the lack of interest he exhibits in developing the architecture of democracy, in order 178

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Conclusion to extend and strengthen the public discussion of science, technology and risk, and the way in which he labels those whose views he disagrees with as ‘eco-fundamentalists’, dismissing them as authoritarians and fundamentalists, suggests that unlike E. M. Forster he finds it hard to tolerate diversity of opinion or to accept criticism. As a rather equivocal supporter of democracy he concludes his assault on unreason and his case for democracy’s rough and ready judgements by insisting that his main goal has been to ‘wage war on those who ignore evidence, or the need for it, where an issue can only be decided by the evidence’ (Taverne, 2005: 280). Despite this declaration of war, found in the peroration to his March of Unreason, Taverne does appear to recognise elsewhere in his book that many of those who have limited faith in politicians, business leaders and science share ‘a common fear that scientists are determined to rush ahead wherever new discoveries carry them, irrespective of social consequences’ (33). It is, of course, fears of this kind, which Taverne finds it so difficult to accept should be a legitimate brake on scientific advances that give rise to precisely the kinds of questions which cannot be decided in a democracy on the basis of scientific evidence alone. Although this does not stop Taverne from asking, somewhat plaintively: ‘How it is possible that science can be presented as a threat to nature when it is science that enables us to find out more about it?’ (281). It is a question that helps to explain his insistence on the existence of two different domains, one in which political debate takes place and another in which science reigns supreme and remains unquestioned. Perhaps it also helps to explain why Taverne proposes a third cheer for democracy (that turns out to be a cheer for science rather than democracy). The third cheer is proposed because ‘science and technology [in a democracy] create wealth and improve the quality of life’ (282). Of course an alternative cheer, a third and more appropriate cheer for democracy, might be a cheer for the opportunities it provides to hold the powerful and those who govern to account, and for those who lives are profoundly changed by science to have a say in how their world is altered. Furedi on fear and courage in democratic society A superficial acquaintance with the work of Frank Furedi might convince the casual reader that he shares Dick Taverne’s highly conditional and equivocal attitude toward democracy. Furedi is the author of a book that places the Politics of Fear at the centre of our contemporary and – in his view – defective political culture. Politics of Fear – Beyond Left and Right (2005) expresses Furedi’s deep disquiet about the condition of modern politics. It is a work that has been written in order to focus attention on the whole of contemporary political culture, 179

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Food, risk and politics rather than on the supposed fallibility or gullibility of the general public alone. Indeed, Furedi’s fiercest criticisms of contemporary political culture are directed most strongly at those who claim to lead it. How, he asks, can we have mature, informed and confident politics in a society where ‘being scared has become a culturally sanctioned affectation that pervades all aspects of life’ (Furedi, 2005: 1). Fear has been entrenched in our politics. The politics of fear has become a means of social control, employed increasingly cynically and desperately by those who no longer know how to lead or where to lead. While demonising and attacking fundamentalists and highlighting the dangers of fundamentalism may be presented as a means of disturbing public passivity and indifference to political action, as well as challenging popular hostility to science and enlightenment values, as Taverne has tried to do, Furedi presents it as something altogether different. Hostility to what is labelled fundamentalism and to risk taking has become part of the political repertoire of an elite, a cultural not just a political elite, who jealously guard their control over our political institutions and our political life. But the elite, which now tries to set the terms of public debate, lacks any vision for the future of our society. Contemporary political leadership and its willingness to play the fear card, considered from this perspective, becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution to the great risk dilemmas of modern societies. We all, leaders and led alike, need to recover the confidence to fashion a better world rather than accept or simply react to events. Until the disabling culture of fear, which has led to a politics of fear, can be displaced the inspiration of leaders and citizens who have confidence in their own humanity and in humanity’s capacity to make a better world for itself, will be lacking from our politics and civic culture. Furedi goes further still. He argues that references to fundamentalism express a deep contempt, on the part of the political elite, for ‘ordinary folks’ (102). Such language serves as a device enabling a self-satisfied political elite to distance itself from all those broad swathes of the population that it has come to classify as highly susceptible to the ‘siren call of extremists’. The politics of fear is maintained by a ‘cultural elite who, in private conversation, regard ordinary people … as far too crass, materialistic, simplistic, racist, sexist, homophobic and emotionally illiterate’ to take and share responsibility for public policy and the direction of modern society. Indeed, a sophisticated and democratic risk politics is dismissed as impractical and undesirable by the elite, which he believes has come to dominate the political life and culture of societies such as Britain. Political leaders in the world’s more liberal and democratic societies are, Furedi contends, part of a cosmopolitan elite, a group that probably ­includes Dick Taverne in Furedi’s eyes, which is given, from its privileged vantage point, detached from national cultures and contemptuous of religious 180

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Conclusion values and ­ outmoded ideologies, to dismissing individuals and communities possessing strong beliefs and those who expect ‘simplistic black-and-white solutions’. However, the public cannot be entirely ignored by those who lead or aspire to lead, who come increasingly, in Furedi’s opinion, from the arrogant cosmopolitan elite he vilifies. It is necessary to supply an account of society that will appeal to the mass of simpletons; a morally and politically unsophisticated vision that can be comprehended and accepted by ‘politically illiterate voters’ (102). The cynical manipulation of public opinion, the use of simple messages and a determination to reserve complex choices for decision by experts infantilises the public and, in Furedi’s view, confirms – though this is no part of their purpose – the lack of vision and confidence from which national leaders who have become part of the cosmopolitan elite now suffer. Furedi explains that he agrees with the social and political theorist Zygmunt Bauman: Unlike their ancestors of the nation-building era, global elites have no mission to perform – they do not feel the need or intend to proselytise, to carry the torch of wisdom, to enlighten, instruct and convert. (Bauman, 2003: 20)

It is hardly surprising therefore that the politics of fear advances across society where ‘a [lack of ] moral purpose coexists with a sense of cynicism towards society’s institutions’ (20). Contempt towards the public at large and an inability to formulate and pursue a great moral purpose signifies both a weakening of democratic institutions and of practice; it exacerbates a political crisis that is directly attributable to the illegitimacy of modern government. The use of scare tactics – a corollary of a political culture that has been emptied of purpose – feeds public fears and becomes the means to a droll and unsatisfying end; the retention of power and the appurtenances of power. If political rivals lack vision and ambition and party rivalry is concerned almost exclusively with attaining office then the politics of fear will accelerate the erosion of democratic values and intensify what Furedi describes as the ‘exhaustion and demoralisation’ of political culture (2005: 134). The contrast with a political culture in which political rivals ‘are able to project a positive vision of the future’ could not be starker. They ‘do not need to employ fear as the currency in political life’ (134). The risk of failure and the possibility of disaster frame a political debate in which allocating and avoiding blame become the preoccupations of political actors. Furedi suggests that the slogan of a political culture in which fear has become predominant is: not if – but when. However, although intense fear can help define a common interest and build consensus, it can also be used to justify and excuse actions that would not have been acceptable in a liberal and democratic society at other times. When risk 181

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Food, risk and politics politics is dominated by fear and by a never-ending call to act urgently and decisively then debate becomes irrelevant and democratic process can be set aside. Furedi’s dire and disturbing account of the emptiness of our politics and of a time in which the historic aspirations of political parties of left and right no longer have much meaning poses an obvious question. Is it possible to restore, recreate, rediscover the kind of politics in which political leaders offer a vision that is inspiring and are capable of engaging and involving the public they wish to serve? Furedi’s answer to this question is that political culture can be transformed. The transformation is only possible if we reject fatalism and embrace risk and the autonomy and a sense of personal responsibility that goes with it. However, Furedi’s account of individual liberation is ultimately unconvincing. It entails the enthusiastic embrace of a ‘version of personhood that is consistent with the ideals … [and] legacy of the Enlightenment’; as Furedi explains: ‘risk-taking, experimentation, the exercise of critical judgement and reason … is a precondition for the reconstitution of public life’ (163). But he does not explain, beyond insisting that those who revile the politics of fear must proselytise for the recovery of Enlightenment values, how our public life can be reconstituted. He appears to believe that the process of change is primarily one in which individuals, who have accepted his arguments about the exhaustion and the hollowness of contemporary political culture, must strike out on their own. We must renounce the politics of fear and apply the values of Enlightenment humanism in contemporary society. It seems to this author that a critical dimension, an intensely political component – essential for a mature, deliberative and participatory risk politics, is missing. The great exemplars of Enlightenment values lived in societies from which the vast structures of the modern state and communication industries were absent. They also lived in societies in which the growth in human knowledge could more easily be represented as empowering and liberating rather than as threatening or overwhelming. Partnerships between science and the military, science and commerce, and science and government have grown and, as they have become increasingly institutionalised, they have also become more formidable and unaccountable. The growth of complexity and of scale should not be ignored by anyone who is intent on reconstituting public life in a way that encourages and enables both individuals, and the communities of which they are a part, to play a greater role in determining not only how they live their own lives but also how public policy is made on their behalf. It is naive to argue that political culture is the only or necessarily the most important factor accounting for the sense of political disenfranchisement that is undoubtedly a hallmark of contemporary politics and a key component in the politics of fear of which Furedi is such a trenchant critic. The world’s population 182

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Conclusion has grown from less than one billion in 1700 to six and a half billion currently. Contemporary societies are heavily urbanised and have become economically and environmentally interdependent in ways that Furedi’s Enlightenment hero Kant could not have imagined. It is simply unreasonable to propose that the world of Enlightenment risk-taking, which Furedi so admires, can simply be re-established by a kind of cultural fiat that announces personal autonomy but has no means of reinstating the relative simplicity and modest interdependency of an earlier age. We can be bolder and braver but we need more than a new cultural outlook, we need to build and learn to operate political institutions that enable us to take and exercise responsibility for our world and to do so in concert with our fellows. That is a challenge to which I will return towards the end of this chapter. Ulrich Beck – institutions, social change and responsibility in the risk society One academic authority on contemporary political theory and risk politics in particular, Ulrich Beck, in contrast to Furedi, gives every indication that he understands that both scale and complex interdependency matter. Although – like Furedi – his vision of a more responsible and democratic risk politics is deeply flawed, Beck is the author of the cosmopolitan manifesto. Not necessarily the same kind of cosmopolitanism that attracts the ire of Furedi. It is, nevertheless, a view of risk politics that insists that our ability to act individually or locally depends fundamentally on our understanding the scale and indiscriminate character of many of the hazards that fill the modern world. It is also an outlook that lays great emphasis on collective as opposed to individual actions; on the importance of unity in transforming the economics and politics that both creates global hazards and contributes to making them unmanageable. Beck does not flinch from the need for the creation of a shared purpose and a sophisticated and collaborative politics if we are to equip ourselves to look beyond provincial and national interests. He explains that: The underlying basis [of the cosmopolitan manifesto] is an understanding that the central human worries are ‘world’ problems, and not only because in their origins and consequences they have outgrown the national scheme of politics. They are also ‘world’ problems in their very concreteness, in their very location here and now in this town, or this political organisation. (Beck, 1999: 15)

Beck leaves no doubt about the scale and pace of change that he believes requires political and cultural developments that are only possible if we transcend what he views as the naive individualism of the Enlightenment and the nationalism of the twentieth century. Writing in 1999, he explained that: 183

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Food, risk and politics Looming ahead … [are] new issues – environmental and labour legislation – in which regulation is even more sensitive, even more crucial. This is the challenge of the years to come. A first wave of national deregulation enforces the second wave of transnational regulation. Without a decisive step towards cosmopolitan democratisation, we are heading for a post-political technocratic world society. (15)

While Furedi insists that everything waits upon a recovery of the adventurous spirit and the autonomy that made the modern world possible Beck is clear that the risk politics of the next hundred years will depend on forms of transnational collaboration and the creation of political parties and movements that override ‘divergent … cultural assumptions, political forms and income levels’ (16). Nothing less than world society, with political movements and parties that span the globe, will do for a risk politics that is capable of forging the community of purpose needed to match ‘risk society … to the challenges of ecological crisis, which, as we now know, are global, local and personal at one and the same time’ (5). The ambition is extraordinary and admirable but its realisation is altogether another matter. Is it true that anything less than a world society, fashioned as a cosmopolitan risk society, will fail to address the ‘ecological questions’ and ‘manufactured uncertainties’ Beck describes? Beck’s optimism in some parts of his World Risk Society seems unmatchable and irrepressible. He anticipates a utopia – that is ‘built into risk society and risk society theory’: [It is] the utopia of a responsible modernity, the utopia of another modernity, many modernities to be invented and experienced in different cultures and parts of the globe. Anyone who is to be focused on the risk potential of the industrial society fails to understand that risks are a matter not just of unintended consequences – the ‘toxin of the week’ – but also of the unintended consequences of unintended consequences in the institutions. Using the case of BSE, one could say that it is not just cows, but also governing parties, agencies, markets for meat and consumers who are affected and thus implicated in the madness. (Beck, 1999: 147–148)

Unfortunately Beck’s enthusiasm, vision and ambition for fashioning a social and political theory, which integrates his knowledge of political culture and of political institutions into an account of emergent global hazards and a global politics to match them, is characterised by a level of abstraction that makes it difficult for either his opponents or his supporters to do much more than mock his Olympian perspective or stand back in awed admiration at the prophetic nature and dreamlike qualities of the worldscape he presents. A different, more modest, more realistic and more practical view of risk politics commends itself to this author as a superior starting point for all those who, while glimpsing a world risk society in the mists of Beckian ­abstraction, wish to go in search of the tools as well as the arguments, evidence and exemplars that are needed to better understand the many critical aspects of its design and 184

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Conclusion begin its construction much closer to home. Sunstein and Slovic and the others That more realistic and practical view needs to take account of two sets of arguments about our abilities and motivations in balancing a great variety of risk related costs and benefits, and judging them in light of the values that we hold. One of the most eloquent and thoughtful exponents of the view that the domain of citizen involvement in official risk decision making should be limited, so that the consequences of our misperceptions of risk do not lead risk regulators to do more harm than good in response to popular fears, is Cass Sunstein. One of the most eminent representatives of the rival view is Paul Slovic, whose work has also been introduced to readers earlier in this book. Slovic has become something of a self-appointed champion of public consultation and democratic risk management. In 2004 Cass Sustein, an enthusiastic proponent of the cost-benefit state, travelled to the University of Cambridge to give a series of lectures on the relationship between fear, perceptions of danger and the law. One of the most striking things about Sunstein’s lectures was the enthusiasm he showed for integrating ideas from across the social sciences into the study of risk politics. In Risk and Reason, and in what became Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle, Sunstein made particular point of drawing upon the insights that had emerged form social psychology, most especially the empirical work of Paul Slovic. Sunstein’s presentation of what he referred to as the laws of fear was designed to make a powerful and persuasive case against use of the precautionary principle by public-policy makers. As a US citizen Sunstein was well aware of the differences that had been growing for several decades between European and American risk regulation. These differences reflect both shifts in philosophy and practice, which have become ‘more stringent, innovative and comprehensive’ in the EU as they have become less so in the USA (Vogel, 2002: 3). At the core of many of the differences Sunstein described in his Cambridge Seeley lecture series, delivered in March 2004, was a rejection of the use of a precautionary approach that is heavily reliant on claims about the absence of evidence and about uncertainty. The precautionary principle has become increasingly widely accepted as a foundational principle for risk regulation in the EU and further afield. The precautionary – or most simply expressed, the safety first – approach has been represented as a guiding principle for risk management in the European Union since the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty (1992). 185

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Food, risk and politics It is the combination of precaution and what has been labelled public misfearing that has become the greatest concern for Sunstein. Misfearing covers mistaken perceptions that lead to two kinds of errors in estimating danger: fear of things that are not really dangerous and an absence of fear in the face of things that are particularly hazardous. While favouring a deliberative approach to risk regulation, Sunstein expresses particular concern about the threat, to informed and balanced decision making about risk, which can arise from greater public involvement in influencing the political environment for managing and assessing risks. The threat to rationality and balance in public decision making arises, in Sunstein’s view, from the laws of fear that, he was in no doubt, biased and distorted popular estimates of risk – as well as public perceptions of the benefits and costs associated with various kinds of riskiness. Informed and balanced decisions, Sunstein argued, needed to be made in ways that limited the damage that was likely to be done by the intrusion of an ill-informed and fearful public. The empirical evidence that public assessments of risk were powerfully shaped by a severely bounded rationality was, he argued and demonstrated in Laws of Fear, clear and irrefutable (Sunstein, 2005: 1–5). In an elegant and masterful exposition of the potential that fear has to distort our assessment of risks, and their associated costs and benefits, entitled ‘fear as wildfire’, Sunstein begins, in Laws of Fear, by noting that ‘human cognition does not take place in a social vacuum’ (89). Human perceptions of danger, he argues, are powerfully shaped by images of hazard and risk that are most immediately available to us and that exercise the greatest hold on our imaginations and emotions. Both emotion and imagination are influenced by social context and group identification. Emotion and imagination allied to social context determine how readily individual risk perception is associated with waves of public anxiety, fear and even panic. When strong emotions are aroused, such as disgust, anger and fear, and such emotions are widely experienced in response to the same events, Sunstein notes the possibility of social cascades or ‘fear as wildfire’. In such circumstances it is likely that judgements about the degree of individual risk, and the relative costs and benefits associated with different individual and public choices about managing risk, will be poorly connected with the more detached and better informed judgements of expert risk assessors. Sunstein is in no doubt that: If we are committed to a deliberative conception of democracy, we will be neither populists nor technocrats. Law and policy ought not to reflect people’s blunders; democracy should not mechanically follow citizens’ fears, or for that matter their fearlessness (105–106).

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Conclusion We have arrived at the nub of one of the most difficult questions in contemporary risk politics. Assuming that there are very few simple answers to the most complex and contested issues faced by society’s risk managers – including those who have been appointed to lead the collective effort to assure food safety and regulate food-related risks – we are unlikely to be impressed by observers of our risk-related dilemmas who suggest the way ahead is plain to see. Simply summoning up our courage and taking more risks does not seem to be particularly helpful advice to those who have complex choices to make amongst different courses of action. Suggestions that we ignore the siren voices of the fundamentalists and of anti-science lobbyists appears rather simplistic advice to those who have to weigh the risks, costs and benefits of alternative policies. As for those who suggest that we can make little progress until we learn to make each step, each risk decision, part of a wider, global, risk assessment: they appear to be advocating a counsel of perfection calculated to freeze and frustrate decision making. Overcoming the problems that flow from bounded rationality, including such things as probability neglect, and making informed decisions that consider the possibility of irreversible harm, while paying careful regard to public anxiety, Sunstein insists, is a job neither for populists nor technocrats. It is for that reason that he believes that a major role should be given to specialists in regulatory decision making. If the demand for regulation is likely to be distorted by unjustified fear, a major role should be given to more insulated officials who are in a better position to judge whether risks are real (126). That, of course, is precisely what governments say the introduction of food safety agencies, operating at arm’s length from government itself, makes possible. It entrusts risk regulation to officials who are not engaged in a competition for public popularity but who are authorised and equipped to communicate independently and directly with the public about dangers and how to moderate them, at the same time as they give the reasons for their decisions and set out the evidence upon which their decisions and recommendations are based. Sunstein challenged over participatory risk politics However, the social psychologists and leading exponents of the psychometric paradigm, upon whose work Sunstein has relied so heavily, have taken issue with what they see as his rejection of the strength of the case for a much more democratic and participatory risk politics. In their review of Sunstein’s Laws of Fear, while praising much of his work, Dan M. Kahan, Paul Slovic, Donald Braman and John Gastil recognise that ‘the effective 187

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Food, risk and politics regulation of risk poses a singular challenge to democracy’ (Kahan, Slovic, Braman et al., 2006: 1071), and dispute what they characterise as a critical omission from Sunstein’s work. Sunstein has, they believe, conflated two categories of public thought and risk perception. Conflating them leads him, quite unreasonably, to propose a much narrower domain for public involvement in risk regulation and deliberation than is in fact justified in a democratic society. The gap that Kahan, Slovic and their colleagues identify is one that does not lessen the difficulties of publicly accountable risk decision making. They do not dispute the difficulties and dilemmas set out in Cass Sunstein’s Laws of Fear, in fact they regard them as more deeply entrenched in popular risk perception than he does. They note that: The public welfare of democratic societies depends on [the] capacity to abate all manner of natural and man-made hazards – from environmental catastrophe and economic collapse to domestic terrorism and the outbreak of disease. But the need to form rational responses to these and other dangers also challenges democratic societies in a more fundamental way: by threatening their commitment to genuinely deliberative policy-making. (1071)

Kahan and Slovic and their colleagues accept that effective risk regulation depends on highly technical assessments and scientifically sophisticated decision making; and the kinds of knowledge and decision-making skills to which most citizens don’t have access. Indeed, most of those whose welfare and safety is the object of the activities or risk regulators have little inclination – or time – to master, let alone critically assess, the information that is used by risk managers. Why, if this is so, should anyone pay attention to the views – the poorly informed emotionally labile views – of citizens, as opposed to the opinions of much better informed and calculating experts? Their answer differentiates Kahan and Slovic’s account of popular risk perception quite dramatically from Sunstein’s. They propose, in place of Sunstein’s bipolar view of risk perception, a triad of models of popular risk perception. Sunstein, they argue, concentrates in his account of the laws of fear on an ‘irrational-weigher’ model of popular risk perception. Public perceptions of risk are so prone to bias, to misfearing, and to the amplification of misfearing that it is essential, in the public interest, to reserve risk judgements of great political, social and economic import in the commonwealth, to those who can calmly consider them in the light of specialist knowledge. The alternative model, available in Sunstein’s work, acknowledges the possibility of rational-weighers who operate much as experts do – people who ­reason their way, in a risky world, to a utility-maximising course of behaviour. However rational-weighers, beyond the ranks of risk specialists, are hard to 188

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Conclusion find. Kahan, Slovic and their colleagues agree but believe that Sunstein has largely overlooked a model that counts increasingly heavily with researchers in the field of risk perception: ‘Sunstein is remarkably inattentive to [a third model of popular risk perception and] the impact of cultural worldviews’ (1083). They believe that as masterful as Sunstein’s work is, it is undercut by his inattention to what they describe as one of the most important recent advances in the science of risk perception. They claim that Sunstein has overlooked a growing body of work that suggests that cultural worldviews permeate the social and psychological mechanisms through which individuals apprehend risk, including their emotional appraisals of putatively dangerous activities, their comprehension and retention of empirical information, and their disposition to trust competing sources of risk information. Kahan and Slovic call this material on cultural worldviews, cultural cognition. They believe that Sunstein’s advocacy of a form of deliberative democracy that is designed to keep the fears and anxieties of ordinary members of the public at a safe distance, so as not to disturb the well-informed and carefully balanced decision-making of risk specialists, is not only undemocratic but flies in the face of core values, which need to be acknowledged and have a vital role to play in risk regulation in a democratic society. The notion of cultural cognition and competing worldviews has arisen directly out of the theorising and research of a political scientist and an anthropologist. Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas, the authors of Risk and Culture (1982), advanced the view that culture powerfully influences not only how we assess different risks, and which risks we take more seriously, but also which actions and decisions – taken on our behalf – to manage those risks, are judged to be acceptable and appropriate. Douglas and Wildavsky inspired what Kahan and Slovic call the ‘cultural-evaluator’ model of risk perception, in which the existence of ‘clusters of values’ are believed to form ‘competing cultural worldviews’ representing our most strongly held and enduring values. How, they ask, can our most basic beliefs about what is fair and reasonable be excluded from deliberations of regulatory priorities and actions? The ‘cultural-evaluator’ model recognises differences between what Douglas and Wildavsky labelled ‘individualists’, ‘egalitarians’ and ‘hierachists’. People who are likely to disagree fundamentally about how risks should be managed and what is fair and unfair in exposing others to danger. Egalitarians express and exemplify values that, when they weigh heavily with government, may lead it to fabricate a powerful regulatory apparatus to control industrial emissions that threaten environmental damage, not simply on grounds of the environmental damage that may result but because the release of such emissions is perceived as morally wrong and likely to give rise to grave social and economic inequities. Individualists may be aware of environmental damage but discount 189

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Food, risk and politics it because the value they attach to self-determination and free exchange predisposes them to perceive government regulation as almost always disproportionate and ultimately counterproductive. The ‘cultural-evaluator’ model alerts students of risk perception and risk politics, such as Kahan and Slovic, to the possibility that risk disputes, in which the general public is deeply involved, despite their bounded rationality and even profound ignorance, have great political significance. They feel impelled to point out that: If risk disputes are really disputes over the good life, then the challenge that risk regulation poses to democracy is less how to reconcile public sensibilities with science than how to accommodate diverse visions of the good within a popular system of regulation. Fear itself may indeed be what democratic societies, or at least pluralistic ones, most have to fear – not because governmental responses to risk are likely to be irrational, but because risk regulation is inherently fraught with potential for illiberality. (Kahan, Slovic, Braman et al., 2006: 1073)

Do we have incommensurable worldviews which are (or should be) a legitimate part of risk regulation and which explain why we take the positions about risks and their related costs and benefits that we do? Do such views also make reaching agreement formidably difficult? These are questions which focus attention upon the role of values in risk regulation and the extent to which it is possible to take account of diverse values while, at the same time, accepting the strong case that Sunstein makes for evidence-based risk regulation and rational decision making. What Kahan and Slovic invite us to characterise as value-driven differences, Sunstein suggests are, for the most part, proof of distorted and affect-laden popular risk perceptions. Sunstein wishes to hold at bay calls for populist systems of risk regulation that take public views and risk evaluations at face value and equate them with the public interest, rather than see them for what he believes they are: persuasive evidence of the public’s ill-informed fears and wishes. Indeed, it is for precisely this reason that one of the major objectives of Sunstein’s Laws of Fear is the presentation of a devastating critique of the precautionary principle. It is a principle that Sunstein regards as unduly – and irresponsibly – responsive to public sentiment. It is, he insists, ‘literally incoherent’ as a guide for risk managers because it fails to weigh ‘risks [and their associated costs and benefits] on all sides of social situations’ (Sunstein, 2005: 4). As Kahan and Slovic point out, the precautionary principle enjoys widespread support among environmentalists and regulatory authorities. On one interpretation it asserts that where there is scientific uncertainty regulators should place a moratorium on actions that might give rise to harm until there is convincing scientific evidence to the contrary. What Sunstein refers to as a 190

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Conclusion freezing of activity, while waiting for evidence of safety, is a source of great concern to him. It is likely to mean that low-probability risks gum up the whole of the public decision-making process. However, if the precautionary principle is regarded as an expression of values that are widely and strongly held, ought not those values to be respected and reflected in regulatory caution? If, as Kahan and Slovic, and Sunstein appear to agree, it is unlikely that strongly held values supporting precaution or deep public irrationality, which links precaution uncritically with safety, can be dispelled by education, the scene is set for a kind of regulatory rigor mortis. As Kahan and Slovic acknowledge, the same mechanism that causes members of the public to form, from an actuarial point of view, exaggerated perceptions of risk are also likely to prevent them from processing scientifically sound information in a rational way. Sunstein goes so far as to recommend a policy of distraction in order to limit the impact of public fears about low-probability hazards and leave specialist risk regulators free to do their job of balancing risks, costs and benefits, in the public interest: ‘The best approach may be this: Change the subject … discuss something else and let time do the rest’ (125). Yet, Sunstein protests that he is a democrat, as do Kahan and Slovic. Their differences over how much credence to give the ‘cultural-evaluator’ model and how universally the ‘irrational weigher’ model can be applied are unlikely to be resolved by academic debate, however sophisticated it may be. And it has become very sophisticated indeed (see their Harvard Law Review exchange: Kahan, Slovic, Braman et al., 2006; Kahan and Slovic, 2006; Sunstein, 2006). The balance to be struck between what Sunstein refers to as Democrats and Technocrats (although in Laws of Fear he distinguishes between what he calls Populists and Technocrats) should rest, he believes, on a rule that may be simple to state but is likely to prove extremely difficult to apply: officials should respond to people’s values, rather than to their blunders. If bounded rationality is leading to excessive fear, government should not require precautions that fail to increase safety but that impose significant burdens. If bounded rationality is leading people to neglect serious risks, government should not compound that neglect with official indifference. To be sure, risk regulation is no mere technocratic exercise. If people’s values lead them to show special concern with certain risks, government should take that into account. (Sunstein, 2006: 1121)

How, the reader may reasonably ask, can that be done? The answer lies in the way in which we invoke the precautionary principle and the way in which we institutionalise both the public and the expert deliberation of risk in our risk politics. The discussion that follows begins with an examination of the precautionary principle, its application and its antithesis. The Conclusion then moves on to a discussion of the agency established in 2000 191

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Food, risk and politics to undertake a more deliberative and transparent assessment of food-related risks in Britain, the Food Standards Agency. Careful attention will be paid to some of the principal arguments that have been advanced in favour of deliberative democracy, while recognising the challenges that public deliberation of food safety has given rise to, before concluding this chapter. Precaution One of the most important arguments advanced by Cass Sunstein, in opposition to the invocation of the precautionary principle as a general guide to risk regulation, is the claim that it is hopelessly vague. Because of its vagueness Sunstein believes it can offer little assistance to those who need to make judgements about how much precaution, if any, is justified. Even if the public can be involved in deliberative decision-making, given how bounded he believes public rationality to be, can deliberation, which relies upon the public discussion of precaution, be expected to lead to proportionate and actuarially sound decisions? One of the most important discussions and assessments of the principle can be found in a report commissioned by the European Environment Agency (EEA). The EEA report was subsequently published as a book entitled The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings (Gee, MacGarvin et al., 2002). The book’s subtitle is the strongest clue to its presentation and justification of the principle as the cornerstone of intelligent and informed regulatory policy. The volume’s many contributors dissent from Sunstein’s assertion that: The real problem is that the principle offers no guidance – not that it is wrong, but that it forbids all courses of action, including regulation. (Sunstein, 2005: 26)

Their definition of precaution is rather more sophisticated and heavily qualified than the version of precaution that Sunstein declares to be paralysing. It allows for a balancing and contrasting of two principles. While one of those principles is precautionary the other is reactionary. Let us begin with what is now widely accepted as a clear statement of the core components of the precautionary principle based on the Wingspread consensus formulated in 1998. David Kriebel, in an article for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, published in 2007, lists four central components of the precautionary principle: • Willingness to take preventive action in the face of uncertainty; • Acceptance of the need to shift the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; • Readiness to explore a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful ac192

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Conclusion tions; and, • Commitment to increasing public participation in decision-making. All four are subject to the requirement to consider whether what is being proposed could reasonably be thought to give rise to ‘potentially serious and/or irreversible threats to health or the environment’. Invoking the principle assumes that there ‘is a need to act to reduce potential hazards before very strong proof of harm, taking into account the likely costs and benefits of action and inaction’ (EEA, 2001: 4). Such a qualification amounts to an insistence on proportionality -- the requirement that the costs associated with halting, delaying or modifying some course of action can reasonably be thought to be outweighed by the benefits of doing so. The precautionary principle also requires that a decision to ban or delay is accompanied by research and monitoring to reduce or overcome uncertainty and support the search for amendments or alternatives, which are believed to be less hazardous/about which more is known. In practice precaution may be consistent with the limited use of a new technology and careful study of its impact on human health or ecology, rather than an outright ban. In practice the proportionate application of the precautionary principle may entail a judgement between precautionary and reactionary principles. Kriebel (2007: 573) describes the chief components of the reactionary principle as: • Requiring incontrovertible evidence of harm for each hazard before taking preventive action; • Placing the burden of proof on the public (or government agencies) to show that each chemical, material or technology is harmful; • Reluctance to consider potential health and environmental impacts when designing new materials and technologies; and • Discouraging public participation in decision-making concerned with the control of hazards and the introduction of new technologies. If, as Cass Sunstein argues, the precautionary principle is quite literally incoherent the alternative, the reactionary principle, also appears to be deeply and very obviously flawed, though it is not paralysing. The issue of course, for regulators and for the public, is how to balance reaction and precaution. Amongst the principal requirements for balancing reaction and precaution is reliable information and an ability to make good use of that information with a minimum of delay. While the precautionary principle is paralysing because, if it is interpreted quite literally and without qualification, it prevents steps that make it possible to weigh the costs and benefits of action and inaction, the alternative, the reactionary principle, appears to be quite needlessly disabling. 193

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Food, risk and politics What the public requires, in steering a path between paralysing precaution and disabling reaction, is a means of judging and balancing the costs and benefits associated with particular risks. Aware of the undeniable problems associated with human risk perception, most particularly the cognitive characteristics that are responsible for our bounded rationality – for misfearing – the quest for a properly informed and appropriately deliberative and democratic risk politics becomes all the more important. The record of the reactionary principle in action, explored in great detail in the EEA’s account of precaution (Late Lessons from Early Warnings), serves to reinforce the case for a sustained investment in intelligent precaution. Poul Harremoës and his colleagues, authors of The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century, set out to answer four key questions in a series of case studies about suspected hazards and environmental threats. • When was the first credible scientific ‘early warning’ of potential harm? • When and what were the main actions or inactions on risk reduction taken by regulatory authorities and others? • What were the resulting costs and benefits of the actions or inactions, including their distribution between groups and across time? • What lessons can be drawn that may help future decision-making? (EEA, 2001: 2) The authors of the fourteen case studies that make up Late Lessons from Early Warnings are in no doubt that: The case studies provide many examples where regulatory inaction led to costly consequences that were not – and sometimes could not have been – foreseen.   The case studies also provided many examples where ‘early warnings’, and even ‘loud and late warnings’, were clearly ignored [and] where the scope for hazard appraisal was too narrow. (EEA, 2001: 216)

The editors of the volume were well aware that despite their strong commitment to scientific objectivity and rationality they would find themselves under suspicion of having chosen cases that were exceptional and misleading; cases that offered little or no guidance to public-policy makers. In an attempt to try to address and redress any suspicion about their motives and their degree of scientific detachment they invited others to join them in their work. In effect they acknowledged the possibility of false positives. That is to say they recognised the possibility that invocation of precaution had been misguided and harmful by, for example, delaying the deployment of a beneficial technology or ­replacement of a harmful one. All those who consider how a balance should be struck between reaction and precaution need to carefully consider the response to the challenge they issued: 194

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Conclusion despite inviting some industry representatives to submit [examples of false positive], and discussing these in detail, no suitable examples emerged … The challenge of demonstrating false positives remains … (3–4)

If we have learnt some lessons very late, as Poul Harremoës and others have shown to be the case, it seems reasonable to ask whether it is possible to launch a process, in which the public can be more involved in risk politics, alongside risk specialists, so that we are better equipped to manage risk and build the public trust that is so widely desired in risk management in future. While Sunstein may well be justified in arguing that: ‘when ordinary people are asked whether a risk is serious they are not likely to respond with a quantitative analysis of the projected harm’, he nevertheless acknowledges the possibility that ‘if they [the public were] more reflective [they might] consider at least three variables: the anticipated harm, the cost of reducing or eliminating the risk, and the related moral and political issues’ (Sunstein, 2006: 1114). These are among the observations that Sunstein makes in responding to Kahan and Slovic’s advocacy of the ‘cultural-evaluator’ model. He goes on to note that: ‘we have limited knowledge of the relationship between people’s cultural values and their risk perception’ (1114). It is a lacuna in both our knowledge and in our political practice that is slowly being rectified. It is also a deficiency in democratic practice that could be rapidly remedied, by developing forms of risk politics that are more deliberative and more participatory. Indeed, in Britain, some modest progress has already been made in strengthening public involvement in risk politics. In order to consider the strength of the case in favour of such public involvement, assess its success to date, and its potential for the future it is necessary to consider some of the key arguments that have been deployed by political scientists and others in support of deliberative and participatory democracy – most specifically in relation to risk politics and food safety. It provides an opportunity to consider the operation of a new political institution, the Food Standards Agency, and the nature of the public involvement that there has been in its work. Deliberation�������������������������������������������������� , risk and public safety – a place for the public One of the most persuasive and successful attempts to marshal arguments in favour of greater public participation in risk politics can be found in the work of the political scientist Albert Weale. Weale edited Risk, Democratic Citizenship and Public Policy (RDCPP), which was published in 2002. It brought together the scholarship and political insight of an impressive team of contributors to a British Academy conference held in June 2001. Weale’s own contribution 195

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Food, risk and politics reflected earlier work that he had published in Science and Public Policy and Government and Opposition. The case he advanced, in his chapter on public consultation in RDCPP, skilfully combines a discussion of the means of deepening and extending public involvement in risk politics with a presentation of the political reasoning that has come to underpin the case for broadening and deepening public consultation. Weale begins with a rejection of the style of public-policy making in which risk is looked upon, as it was in the lead-up to the salmonella scare affair, as a subject best reserved for a political and administrative elite. An elite consisting of policy makers and their advisers whose close acquaintance is characteristic of what has been called ‘club government’. Making policy in the privacy and special atmosphere of a Whitehall club – this one paid for by the general public – had become increasingly problematic as those outside the club became aware that more and more things were going wrong. Indeed, the Whitehall club, held responsible for what were widely perceived as a series of Whitehall farces, including salmonella in eggs and the BSE in cattle debacle, proved unable to resist popular demands for something rather more far-reaching than a change of management. Institutional changes that produced greater openness, increasing scrutiny and accountability, became the order of the day. The case studies in this book illustrate only too clearly the circumstances that gave rise to a general loss of confidence in food safety regulation in the UK, circumstances that led more people to question the restricted membership and largely unpublished rules of the Whitehall club. The exclusivity of the club gave way before a barrage of criticisms about official secrecy, lack of accountability and an urgent need for transparency. But, beyond the criticisms of established arrangements, what is it that the case for greater public participation in risk politics rests upon? Weale has identified six principal arguments for engaging the public – or members of the public considered to be capable of representing public interests and/or public opinion – in public-policy making and risk politics in particular: • The first of these concerns the avoidance of conflict and the creation of consensus. If a public policy is thought likely to prove contentious or has been contentious then government may have good reason to want to prepare the ground for its general acceptance by demonstrating that it has listened and taken account of popular doubts and disagreements. GM Nation? can be viewed as one initiative, following a bruising decade of food scares and crises, aimed at directly addressing and managing just such public doubts and disagreements. • The second ground upon which enhanced public involvement in policy 196

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Conclusion making may be justified depends upon an acceptance by government (and a matching suspicion amongst the general public) that public-policy making is/has been insufficiently responsive to popular concerns and overly attentive to the interests of those who are especially well-connected and particularly well-endowed with the resources typically needed to win the ear of government. The economically mighty and well-organised interests of producer groups, such as major food retailers, food manufacturers and the agro-chemical industries, cannot, it is argued, be held in check by traditional parliamentary and representative means; there is a need for more direct and better supported representation of the public and consumer interests to achieve balance in the representation of different viewpoints. • The third reason may be harder to grasp. It rests on the proposition that the specialists/experts who are most often consulted by government do not have a monopoly of the wisdom and knowledge needed to manage risk intelligently. This is well illustrated by both the BSE and FMD cases studies in this book. The Southwood Working Party, while it contained eminent scientists, lacked the specialist expertise to make sound judgements about a previously unknown disease. Although there were a number of rival opinions they were not consulted or presented alongside the opinions of the government’s chosen experts. In the case of FMD the dominance of one particular interest and an establishment viewpoint, the interest of livestock farmers as represented by the NFU, and the views of the veterinary establishment, were never seriously questioned. Though there were alternative viewpoints available to government, which could have been clearly represented to key policy makers, they were largely ignored. Openness to a wider range of public opinion facilitates the articulation of expertise that would otherwise be overlooked and helps to improve the quality of scientific and technical decision making. • The fourth ground upon which wider public engagement can be justified is widely understood and generally accepted – even though it may be extraordinarily difficult to achieve in practice. While many of the issues that focus the attention of risk regulators are technical in character there are many that are not. While the risk of a particular kind of food contamination or the vulnerability of a particular group in the population to illnesses attributable to such contamination can be established empirically and debated scientifically, such information is necessary but not sufficient for good risk management. The balancing of the costs and benefits of different kinds of regulatory actions, when public resources are limited, is something that requires political judgement, in which – it is surely entirely reasonable to suppose – the general public have a clear interest. When discussion of GM science and GMO ingredients in food move beyond technical arguments 197

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Food, risk and politics about the assessment of possible ecological hazards or the precise measurement of GMO quantities in foods, and on to such issues as the public acceptability of field trials and the labelling of foods containing GM ingredients, the relevance of public attitudes becomes (or should become) a vital consideration for public-policy makers. The brief of risk managers is not only to consider the public’s best interests but to listen and respond to the public’s wishes. • The fifth ground upon which greater public engagement in risk politics rests is closely allied to the fourth. Risk politics in a democracy should be – like other forms of public action and decision making – open and accountable to the public it serves. It is, from this perspective, essential that the public are made aware of not only what is being done in their name but why it is being done. It is a pre-condition of democratic risk politics that the public are not only made aware of the reasons for particular risk management decisions but have a genuine opportunity to explore the reasoning and evidence used by key risk managers so that it can be interrogated and challenged if that is thought to be necessary. • The sixth reason for promoting greater public involvement in risk politics rests on the signal importance of decisions that society’s risk regulators are called upon to make on behalf of others. Many of the actions and decisions associated with each of the case studies discussed in this book raise fundamental questions about the kind of society in which we wish to live. For decisions and actions – said to have been made and taken in the public interest – to have democratic legitimacy it is essential that they can be shown to enjoy popular support. If the mechanisms for seeking popular approval for important public policy decisions are perceived to be threadbare then the legitimacy of the decisions made will be in doubt. In modern representative and parliamentary democracies the expression of voters’ interests is widely considered to have been extensively compromised. The weight of party discipline and the reach of the modern executive have both left citizens dissatisfied with the manner in which government can be held to account and with the quality and completeness of the public deliberation of policy. Of course such an outline of the case for greater public engagement in risk politics gives rise to yet more questions. How, in particular, is public consultation and engagement in risk politics to be enhanced – how precisely is it to be implemented? There is no lack of of ideas, no shortage of proposals for a more deliberative democracy. Weale is not alone in identifying the many ­ possible mechanisms for developing a more deliberative and engaging risk politics. James Fishkin and Peter Laslett (2003), John Gastil and Peter Levine (2005), Graham Smith (2005), Robert Goodin and John Dryzek (2006), Denise Vitale 198

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Conclusion (2006), Tim Heysse (2006), and Matt Leighninger (2006), are all members of a rapidly growing band for whom the promise and the challenge of deliberative democracy is amongst the most important and absorbing subjects addressed by contemporary political science. Deliberative democracy may be an infant but its progeny are multiplying at a heartening rate – at least from a democrat’s perspective – and they show an admirable diversity as well as encouraging signs of adaptability. The deliberative family now includes focus groups, citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, community forums and panels, deliberative polls and innovations such as ‘deliberation days’ and ‘visioning for real’. Graham Smith (2005), in his work for the Power Commission, has demonstrated a particular gift in describing the fecundity of democratic innovators from around the world. There are numerous pioneers who have, he explains, set out to take representative democracies Beyond the Ballot. Like Weale, Smith is fascinated and heartened by the variety and potential of such democratic innovation but he is also well aware of its experimental character and the need to refine and develop so that new forms of consultation, participation and deliberation are well matched to the challenges they are asked to meet. The development of the Food Standards Agency, particularly its efforts to involve the public and consult consumer interests, has become a valued and well-studied example of the attempts in Britain to advance consultative, participatory and above all else deliberative risk politics. ATSDR advice on taking the requirements of open communication into account In giving advice to members of its own staff on risk communication the US Department of Health and Human Service’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) makes a critical point about risk politics and respect for public opinion and risk perception. The agency draws attention to the many factors, other than quantification of hazardousness, that influence popular risk perception. In particular, the agency explains to its own staff, that risks that are imposed are much less acceptable to the public than risks that are thought to have been freely chosen. And risks, whether chosen or imposed, over which individuals perceive themselves to have little or no control at all are least acceptable of all. One of the reasons therefore that high-quality risk communication and public engagement in risk politics may have the ability to make risks appear more acceptable is that in simply explaining how risks have arisen, the risks in point may come to be viewed as less of an imposition and as more manageable. If risk politics becomes more communicative, participatory and deliberative 199

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Food, risk and politics it not only stands to gain in terms of legitimacy; it is also likely to gain in terms of public acceptability and effectiveness. It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that a government that is good at making risk management both more participatory and deliberative may also find that it is considered to be good at governing. If government can, not only in communicating risks but also in managing them, take note of two further pieces of advice that the ATSDR gives its staff it may strengthen its position still further: • Risks that are perceived to have clear benefits are more acceptable than those that don’t • Risks that are perceived to more fairly distributed are more acceptable than those that aren’t • Amongst the most important and attainable outcomes of public involvement in risk politics is a better shared appreciation of the balance between the costs and benefits of particular risks, and a clearer understanding of the exposure of different groups in the population to the possibility of harm. The sharing of knowledge about the balance of costs and benefits and about the distribution of risks is – or ought to be – amongst the most important objectives of democratic risk politics. (ATSDR, 2007)

Such arguments in favour of a more sophisticated and democratic risk politics have gained acceptance around the world. The Canadian counterpart to Britain’s Food Standards Agency has welcomed the emergence of what it calls principles for citizen engagement in its work and for participative democracy. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) asserts that they: demonstrate a commitment toward a culture shift that entails two-way interactive discussion and varying levels of public involvement in decision-making. It recognizes that a central premise of a democratic society is to make public decisions in a manner that protects the rights of the individual, but is responsive to the shared needs of all, governments and citizens.

But CFIA does not make light of the difficulties of ‘operationalizing such a culture, [which] pose a number of fundamental practical challenges to government.’ (CFIA, 2001: 5.1). The greatest of those challenges is that agencies with responsibility for managing risk cannot offload their responsibilities on to any other party, however closely they are committed to working with them. The inescapable duty on risk regulators is to pursue what they believe to be the best course of action; it is a duty that means that in inviting the public to take part in decision making, expert risk managers cannot share the ultimate ­responsibility for actions which they believe they must take. CFIA’s leaders have, not unreasonably, asked whether such limitations on citizen engagement undermine all attempts at public consultation and involvement in deliberation. The answer is unambiguous: 200

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Conclusion restriction on public input into government decision-making may appear to minimize citizen engagement as an effective means of incorporating citizens’ wishes and views into public policy. Despite the apparent conflict, however, practitioners’ experience leads us to believe that engaging citizens in discussions on policy-making or on high visibility controversial issues is not only necessary, but also a very effective means of developing public policy (CFIA, 2001: 5.1.1).

Canadian experience aligns well with experience in Britain and the European Union. New and more deliberative ways of communicating and managing risk are being developed, but there are very clear practical limits to the numbers of people drawn from the population as a whole who can be involved. However, even though risk regulators are unlikely to involve no more than a few of us personally in their most detailed work, public involvement still matters and can form an important part of what we value about being citizens of a democratic society. Participatory and deliberative risk regulation is a means of demonstrating to citizens – whether they are directly involved or not – that their views matter and that public involvement is valued. It is also a way for government to respond to allegations that it cannot be trusted because it is reluctant to be open about its management of risk. Indeed, the case for deliberation and participation can be made still more strongly. Public involvement in regulatory processes can enable regulators to seek both the views and the support of public representatives. Such involvement can help to increase the legitimacy of regulation and supply a good deal of the evidence of public support for their work that regulatory authorities crave. The Food Standards Agency – under a mini-microscope The UK’s Food Standards Agency – established in 2000 – has itself been the subject of a series of evaluations and assessments. Most have declared it a success, although some have questioned its capacity to reconcile the multiplicity of different objectives that are part of more participatory and deliberative risk regulation. Its first Chairman, Sir John Krebs, claimed – as he was leaving after five years in the role of Chairman – that the fact that he had come into conflict with almost every interest, including the most powerful interests in the food industries, government ministers, environmentalists and consumers, was probably as good evidence as any of the independence and vitality of the organisation he had headed. The review of the agency, which the FSA itself commissioned in October 2004, produced a highly favourable report. It was undertaken by Baroness Brenda Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde (Dean, 2005). The Baroness had been asked to judge how far the Agency had delivered on its core objectives of: 201

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Food, risk and politics • protecting public health by promoting a safer food supply; • providing consumers with the information they needed to choose a safe and healthy diet; • restoring confidence in the way that food decisions were taken by adopting a decision-making process that was open, transparent, consultative and which sought to deliver decisions and actions which were proportionate to risk, and pay due regard to the costs and benefits of those who were affected by them, at the same time as avoiding over-regulation. The Baroness was in little doubt that the ‘agency [had] worked hard to deliver its objectives in accordance with its core values’. Those core values meant that: • the interests of consumers had to come first • being open and accessible should be treated as an overriding obligation, and that the • FSA had an unqualified responsibility to act as an independent voice at all times. The Baroness reported that most stakeholders, some ninety-six ‘external stakeholders’ to whom she had spoken, had agreed that the Agency had made significant progress towards improving food safety, gaining public confidence in food safety, and creating a modern culture in which consultation and openness had been at the core of the agency’s policy development. When Sir John Krebs himself reflected on his five-year stint at the helm of the new organisation he summed up what he regarded as the most important change in regulatory approach and philosophy that had followed the FSA’s creation as: the abandonment of MAFF’s approach, which had been to ‘decide on policy, announce it and then defend it’ (Maitland, 2005). Sir John’s description of MAFF’s failed risk politics, Decide, Announce, Defend (DAD), implied that he had been determined to lead an organisation that was keen to consult and to do so well in advance of giving advice or making new policy whenever that was possible. It was a vote in favour of anticipatory rather than reactionary risk management. However, it is an approach that can only be expected to work well when issues are identified early and debated carefully by well-informed and representative stakeholders who are strongly motivated to find agreement. Amongst the factors that work strongly in favour of finding agreement, even in circumstances where there are clear differences of opinion and interest amongst stakeholders and risk managers, are openness and high-quality ­information provided by experts in whom stakeholders have confidence. The commitment to openness and rigorous and impartial science at the FSA had, Sir John claimed, begun to build trust in place of ‘the old climate of secrecy and suspicion’ (Krebs, 2005). 202

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Conclusion Sir John Krebs’s emphasis on the importance of making the FSA the ‘force for change’, presaged in the White Paper which had given details of the new body in 1998, reflected new thinking in government about the conditions that had to be met in order to build and maintain trust in public risk regulation. Those conditions acknowledge many of the weaknesses in the risk politics of food safety exposed and discussed in the case study chapters of this volume. They also point to the substantial changes in the conduct of risk politics that are needed to displace Decide, Announce and Defend with an approach to risk regulation that begins with Anticipation, is followed by Deliberation and leads on to Decision (we might well refer to it as ADD). The difficulties likely to be encountered in drawing together many of the strands of new thinking about risk politics should not be underestimated. The need and the willingness to travel along this road – away from DAD and towards ADD – and its acceptance as the touchstone of a new risk and food politics should not come as a surprise to anyone who has arrived at this point in the book. One diligent and astute observer of the FSA since its establishment in 2000, Henry Rothstein, has offered a rather more mixed verdict on the agency’s progress since its establishment than its first Chairman. In a paper published in 2002 Rothstein examines how the Agency sought to fashion a stakeholder decision-making process, with only partial success. Its goal was to formulate policy to manage risks arising from the possible spread of BSE to sheep. Rothstein judged that the FSA had abandoned its unqualified commitment to evidence based decision-making in an attempt to retain and build the support of key stakeholders. This had only been possible because the FSA had adopted what Rothstein described as ‘interpretive flexibility’ in the way it operationalised the key notion of precaution. The problem for the FSA was that it confronted great uncertainty about the transmission of BSE to sheep and an outright ban on the entry of lamb to the consumer market would have met with dismay from farmers and representatives of the meat industry. The Agency’s decision, to focus its efforts on banning the use of sheep intestines as casing for sausages, permitted it to assert that it was acting independently and vigorously in the interests of consumers without losing the support of producers. Rothstein has authored a series of research papers on the work of the FSA (2002, 2005, and 2007). In each of them he has identified organisational and institutional factors that make it difficult for the FSA to reconcile its commitment to openness with other organisation goals, including: putting consumer interests first; evidence-based decision-making; truly participatory and ­deliberative policy-making; and independence from government. Most importantly Rothstein has argued, persuasively, that improving consumer confidence is ‘not necessarily identical to the aim of prioritising the consumer interest in regulatory outcomes’ (2005: 541). Given asymmetries in the information 203

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Food, risk and politics a­ vailable to consumers, their representatives, risk regulators and other stakeholders, it is highly likely (indeed probable) that a precise definition of the consumer interest may turn out to be slippery and elusive in a regulatory environment, where it is necessary to try and satisfy international partners, such as the EU’s Food Safety Authority, and domestic partners, such as local authorities and central government departments, simultaneously. It makes little sense, for example, for a risk regulator to set off in pursuit of a definition of the consumer interest, however laudable, that cannot be reflected in the work of any of its key regulatory partners. Rothstein points, with obvious justification, to the difficulties that regulatory partners, in a complex and multilevel regulatory environment, experience because of their limited resources and lack of suitably skilled personnel. The FSA has, for this reason, tended to choose softer and more attainable goals over those that might be regarded as more important but much more difficult to attain. The agency’s poor performance in tackling the subject of allergens in food attracts particularly strong criticism from Rothstein. Perhaps the most interesting detailed account of the work of the FSA that Rothstein provides, entitled ‘Talking Shops or Talking Turkey?’ (2007), discusses the circumstances in which the FSA disbanded its own consumer committee in 2005, having established it three years earlier. What it described as ‘one of the agency’s key strategic aims … to put consumers first’, was said to explain its decision, in 2002, to ‘set up a consumer committee to help ensure the views and interests of consumers are represented’ (Rothstein, 2007: 586). In fact the members of the consumer committee, with whom Rothstein was able to talk at length, told him that in their view the FSA had failed them in not fully reflecting and taking account of the views and interests which they believed they represented. Clashes between the FSA and its consumer committee over the amount of water in chicken, the representation of low-income consumers, and food promotion to children, led members of the consumers committee to conclude that the agency looked to them for uncritical support in its work but dismissed their views and priorities when they came into conflict with the objectives of the Agency’s board. Such clashes should not come as a surprise to those who advocate a more deliberative and participatory risk politics. They reflect not only the teething troubles that are an inevitable accompaniment of innovative attempts to engage the public in risk politics, but clear – and hardly unexpected – differences of view about the roles and responsibilities of those who are legally responsible for risk regulation and have been employed as expert risk managers. And the frustrations that are always likely to be experienced by those who have little or no authority of their own, who have been invited to express their views as ordinary citizens and who have never been given firm promises about how seriously their views will be taken. 204

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Conclusion Graham Smith, in his masterly Beyond the Ballot, identifies many possible barriers to public participation and to more open and public deliberation. The barriers are substantial but are unlikely to prove insuperable in an age when risk politics plays such an important and prominent part in democratic politics and ‘club government’ attracts particular disdain and suspicion. It is, as Smith acknowledges, never going to be easy to translate rhetoric about participation and deliberation into practice; that does not mean that it is impossible. Governments that authorise and encourage participation may well have priorities, such as their re-election, that come into conflict with an enhanced participatory role for public representatives. Those who are asked to facilitate greater public involvement may lack many of the resources or the skills to make it work well – at least to begin with. While participation and deliberation may be considered good things, if they are ill-conceived or poorly designed they may prove counter-productive. It is possible, using Rothstein’s terminology, that they will be rejected as talking shops rather than being viewed as an opportunity to talk turkey. High-quality deliberation and rewarding participation almost certainly depends heavily on imagination and motivation. A lack of good leadership may limit what can be achieved. It is quite possible, as appears to have been the case with the FSA’s first attempt at organising direct consumer participation in its work, that enhanced participation is frustrated by professional resistance or the unreasonable expectations of those invited aboard. It is also possible that participants welcomed aboard – because of their supposed independent judgement – are rapidly co-opted, captured and incorporated by the organisation from which they were asked to maintain their independence. It is also possible that participants who retain their independence will be frustrated by the reluctance or inability to change the organisation in which they have been asked to participate. Such difficulties and obstacles are to be expected and will come as no great shock to those who are familiar with democratic institutions. However, other obstacles may prove more challenging; the lack of clear incentives to participate; limited awareness of what is possible and even more limited confidence in both the ability to participate and the beneficial results of such participation. For those who doubt what is possible it is time to turn to the impassioned and informed plea for greater use of what they call mini-publics by Robert Goodin and John Dryzek. As they observe: Exposing problems and failures is all too easy … [but we need] more mini-publics – both in order to populate the social scientists’s sample and, more [much more] ­importantly, in order to improve democratic practice (Goodin and Dryzek, 2006: 239).

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Food, risk and politics Risk and deliberation – in search of mature risk politics In drawing this book to a close there is one obvious question: Why bother to even make the attempt to manage food-related risks better if it may all be in vain? Time and again food safety and animal health scares and crises have arisen, disturbed the public and the body politic, and – it seems – made little lasting difference. Many of those scares and crises have not been anticipated. What realistic prospect is there that reforms in the way we manage food-related risks can lessen the risks we are exposed to or enable us to manage them better in future? Anyone reading John Adams’s Risk (1995) may conclude that the prospects of doing better are exceedingly poor. Adams suggests that efforts to make food – or anything else – safer are likely to prove unsuccessful. Even attempting to increase public confidence in risk management may prove futile – though that is a proposition with which I would strongly disagree. Wouldn’t it be best, if we take Adams seriously, to abandon attempts to make things safer before beginning them? Indeed, Adams has good reason to prompt such questions. He concludes his book on risk by explaining that the ability to manage risks is itself part of a complicated and ever changing matrix of hazard and human response to danger. In that matrix, we know that how we behave forms part of what has to be managed if we do indeed wish to make ourselves and others safer. For example, improvements in safety or reductions in risk in one area of our lives may – Adams argues they often do – simply encourage us to take greater (what might be called balancing) risks (or risks of another kind) elsewhere. This possibility is one that many nutritionists, for example, recognise when they point to our increasing risk of obesity, despite the enormous gains there have been in terms of the availability and quality of foods for purchase. Adams’s message is that risks – like energy – can be re-arranged but never destroyed or made to disappear. However, I hope, for students of risk politics and for readers of this book the goal of a more accountable and deliberative risk politics is not an unreal and unattainable goal. The goal is not to abolish risk – that is impossible. Rather it is to improve the way in which particular kinds of risk are identified, assessed, communicated and managed. It is to do so in a way that makes us more confident about the safety and the quality of the food we eat. It is – above all else – to anticipate threats to the safety of what we eat and the safe operation of the food economy on which we depend. Democratic risk politics is, at its best, about the consensual management of risks in which we are all involved. It is a politics in which our welfare and wishes are the primary concern of society’s risk regulators and there is a well-developed means for views and 206

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Conclusion information to flow back and forth. In search of better vehicles for accountable risk politics Rothstein’s study of the FSA has described and analysed tensions and conflicts that have arisen in the course of attempts to develop a more participatory and deliberative food safety risk regulation regime in the UK. He is surely right to suggest that trade-offs are unavoidable and that a ‘one-sizefits-all approach to broadening participation is unlikely to be [successful]’ (Rothstein, 2007: 604). What is needed is a willingness to experiment, refashion and adjust arrangements to broaden public involvement in risk regulation and deepen and strengthen opportunities for regulators and the general public to understand each other’s points of view, and to engage in a conversation that is capable of providing early warnings of regulatory failures and of the issues that need to be addressed jointly by regulators and consumers. R. B. Foster, in considering what is needed to enhance trust in institutions that manage risk, emphasises the importance of what he describes as effective, two-way risk communication. But Foster is keen to point out that risk communication is not itself a panacea. There is in fact a great variety of consultative and participatory machinery with which to experiment and with which we need to experiment. Goodin and Dryzek note, in their ‘Deliberative Impacts: The Macro Political Uptake of Mini-publics’ (2006) that citizen participation has great potential and has too often and too readily been represented as a failure. Their account of the diversity of deliberative innovations, such as citizens’ panels, consensus conferences, planning cells and deliberative polls, and the successes of those innovations should embolden all those who believe that it is both desirable and practicable to strengthen risk politics by making sustained and determined efforts to increase the extent as well as the sophistication of public participation in risk management regimes. There is reason to believe that the series of food scares, scandals and crises dealt with in this book, which stretch back to 1988, have brought an end to an age of elitist policy making and risk politics in which the public were expected to accept that national leaders, and the small group of experts who advised them, always knew best. Why, Albert Weale asks in Risk, Democratic Citizenship and Public Policy, should the public remain silent and unprotesting passengers in the back of a vehicle being driven very badly by people they no longer trust? (Weale, 2002: 124). While the majority of passengers would no doubt accept the impracticality of everyone trying to climb into the driver’s seat at the same time it is neither impractical nor 207

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Food, risk and politics unreasonable for some of those who most often occupy the back seats to make their way to the front of the vehicle and study, at first hand, how it is being driven, where it is being driven and even to take a hand in deciding where it should be driven next.

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Index

Adams, J. 206 ADD (anticipation, deliberation, decision) 203 Acheson, Sir Donald 70 affect heuristic 17 Anderson, I. 5, 150–1, 154 antibiotic resistance 14, 104 Associated British Foods 45 AstraZeneca 102 asymmetry principle 84, 88–9, 171, 176 ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry) 166, 199–200 availability heuristic 114, 136–7, 154, 165 Barr, John (and Martin) 50–1, 58–9 Bauman, Z. 181 Beck, U. 9, 22–3, 161, 164, 175, 183–4   Risk Society 9, 10, 20, 22, 164, 183–4 Beckett, M. 98–9 Belgium 24, 28, 114–15, 118, 120–2, 126, 138–9, 140, 174 Better Regulation Commission (BRC) 166 bio-security 143, 155–6 biosolids 159 Blair, T. 24, 28, 75, 90, 96 Blom-Cooper, L. 55–6 Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) vi, 1, 2, 5, 12, 14, 24–9 passim, 34, 47, 49, 70–5, 78–89, 105, 107, 123, 132, 134, 135, 163, 168–71, 173–4, 184, 196–7, 203 bovine TB 1 British Academy Conference (on risk, democratic citizenship and public policy held in 2001) 196 British Medical Association (BMA) 6–8, 46, 94   Living with Risk, 6–8 British Medical Journal (BMJ) 94 BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) vi,

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1–2, 5, 12, 14, 24–5, 27–9, 34, 47, 49, 70–89 passim, 105, 107, 123, 132, 134–5, 163–74 passim, 184, 196–7, 203 see also encephalopathy BSE Inquiry 168, 170 see Philips Inquiry Buzby, J.C. 117, 122 Byrne, D. 30, 125 Cabinet Office Briefing Room (COBRA) 152–4 Calman, Sir Kenneth (Chief Medical Officer) 70 Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) 167, 200–1 Carson, R. 176–7   Silent Spring 176 case study(ies) vi, vii, 9, 23–30 passim, 81, 84, 90, 125, 128, 160–71 passim, 194, 196, 198, 203 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) 51–2 CJD Surveillance Unit 76, 85, 171 club government, risk and 196, 205 Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) 19 Coghlan, A. 148 Cook, G. 92, 107–13, 172 crop trials 91, 98 culling 152–3 Currie, E. 24–45 passim, 167 Davies, N. vii, ix Dean, Brenda Baroness of Thorton-le-Fylde 201 DAD (decide, announce, defend) 202–3 Dehane, Jean-Luc 114–15 deliberative democracy 11, 189, 192, 198–9 Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) 90, 98, 145, 150 Department of Health (DoH) 31, 35, 39, 70,

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Index 75, 169 Destickere, A. 121 diabetes 15 dioxin(s) vi, 14, 24, 28, 114–44 passim,163, 173–4 disaster science 27, 49–69 passim, 168–9 Donaldson, A. 148 Dorrell, S. 70–2, 76, 78, 88, 171 Douglas, M. 20–1, 28, 136, 173, 189 E. coli O157 vi, 5–6, 14, 25–7, 49–68 passim, 72, 101, 168 encephalopathy/ies 72, 74–5, 170 see also BSE European Commission 115–16, 122, 124–7, 142, 173 European Environment Agency (EEA) 166, 192–4 European Food Authority 125 European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) 19, 173–4 European Union (EU) 13, 23, 27, 29–30, 66, 71–89 passim,116–18,122–7, 142, 163, 166, 173–4, 185–6, 201, 204 Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) 57–9 fear as wild fire 129, 136, 138, 186 see also social cascades Fishkin, J.S. 199 Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) 19, 80, 142–3 food-borne disease/hazards/illness/risks/threats 28, 31, 34, 39, 49, 51, 53, 57, 63, 66, 117, 127, 164, 173 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 116, 122 food economy 4, 12–13, 15–16, 44, 64, 81, 112, 115, 124–7, 129, 138–40, 144, 159–60, 162–4, 167, 173–5, 206 food law 18–19, 125, 173 food poisoning 27, 32–42 passim, 49 food policy vii, 5, 12, 14–16, 26, 30–2, 39–47 passim, 78, 81–2, 84, 124, 129, 163, 167 Food Safety, European Union White Paper on 125 Food Standards Agency (FSA) 5, 32, 63–4, 165, 174, 192, 195, 199–207 passim Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) 13, 24, 29, 142–161 passim, 174–5, 197 Forster, E.M. 177–9 Forsyth, M (Secretary of State for Scotland) 51, 54, 57, 61 Freidberg, S. 16 Furedi, F. 164, 175, 179–84

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 18 Genetically Modified/Genetic Modification/ Genetically Modified Organism (GM/ GMO) vi, 2, 4–5, 13, 24–5, 27–8, 90–113 passim, 117, 137, 161–3, 171–3, 178, 196, 198 GEO-PIE (Cornell Genetically Engineered Organisms Public Issues Education Project) 94–5 GM Dialogue/Nation/Public Debate 28, 90, 98–101, 109, 172, 196 GM Freeze 93 GM Science Review 5 Goldsmith, Sir Edward 106 Gorman, T. 24, 36–7, 39–42 Gummer, J. 70 Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome (HUS) 52 Harvard Center for Risk Analysis 120 Harremoës, P. 194–5 Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) 60–1, 168 Health and Safety Executive (HSE) 155, 165–6 Heddon-on-the-Wall 143 Ho, Mae-Wan 106 HOLMES (Home Office Local Major Enquiry System) 58 Human Genome Project 102 Institute for Animal Health (IAH) 143, 148, 154–6 Interdepartmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment (ILGRA) 166 Ironside J. 76 issue network(s) 43–4, 46–8, 167 James, P./James Report 5, 32, 63, 65, 96 King, A. 154–5 King, Professor Sir David 152 Krebs, Sir John 201–3 Kriebel, D. 192–3 Lachmann, Sir Peter 96–7, 104–6, 108 Lancet, The 76, 91, 94–7 Lang, T. 12–16 liberal democracy 8, 17, 79, 86, 98, 108, 114, 162, 172, 175, 177 Lincoln, Abraham 89 Listeria monocytogenes 34 Lok, C. 118–19, 123–4

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Index McDonalds 16 mad cow disease 49, 70, 76, 89, 170 see also BSE mass media (and risk) vi, 28, 37, 127, 130, 135, 162, 173–4, 177 Maxwell, R. 77–82 May, Sir Robert 97, 110, 168, 172, 178 Meat and bone-meal (MBM) 71–2 Meat Hygiene Service (MHS) 67 Mechanically recovered meat (MRM) 75, 83 media feeding frenzy 26, 32, 42 Merial Animal Health 143, 154–6 Millstone, E. 27, 29, 77, 84–6, 169–71 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) 31–2, 34–5, 43, 64, 74–5, 79, 82–5, 89–90, 142, 150–3, 169, 171, 174, 202 misfearing see public misfearing Monsanto 4, 96, 102, 106 moral panics 128, 134–5, 137–8 nanotechnology 91, 100 National Audit Office (NAO) 145 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 5, 45–6, 156, 159, 197 New Scientist (NS) 73, 76, 92–3, 116, 139–40, 142, 148 North, R. 24, 33, 36–43 passim, 124–7, 129   Chickengate 24, 26, 40   Death of British Agriculture, The 33, 40–1, 126 Northern Foods 45 Nuthall, K. 111–12 obesity 15, 206 Office of Science 102–4 Packer, R. 77, 82–3, 85, 89 Panic Nation 104–6 PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyls) 115–16, 118, 120, 126, 140 Pennington, H./ Pennington Reports 24–7, 49–68 passim, 72–3, 168 Perstistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) 14, 115–20, 139 Phillips Inquiry 5, 24, 29, 34, 75, 77, 84, 168, 170–1 see also BSE Inquiry Pirbright 143, 148, 154–6 policy community 32, 40, 42–6, 48, 167 policy disaster 153, 169 policy of sedation 84, 171 politics of fear 164, 179–83 Powell, D. 24, 118–19, 123–4

Power Commission 199 precautionary principle 92, 111–12, 120, 137, 166, 185, 190–4   Wingspread consensus and 192 prion disease 72–4, 76 probability neglect 114,128, 136–7, 140, 154, 165, 187 Prusiner, S. 73 psychometric paradigm vi, 17, 87, 114, 136–7, 173, 187 Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS) 36, 40–2 public misfearing 186, 188, 194 Pusztai, Á. 90–1, 93–7, 105–6, 111 Rampton, S. 4, 157, 159–60 Rational Actor Paradigm (RAP) 17 Rawnsley, A. 83 reactionary principle 113, 193–4 recombinant DNA technology 101 Red Tractor 5 regulatory regime(s) 64, 66, 124–5, 128, 154, 169 Reilly, J. 132 Riley, P. 93 risk   assessment(s) 9, 23, 29, 112, 165–6, 168, 170, 174, 187   assessors vii, 164–6,168–9, 186   communication vii, 11, 25, 77, 79, 83, 86–7, 133–4, 165–7, 169, 174, 199, 207  �������������������������� communicators 23, 138, 165  ������������������������������������� management vii, 8, 34, 44, 77–8, 83, 113–14, 127, 129–30, 138, 143, 156, 167, 169, 175, 185, 195, 197–8, 200, 202, 206–7   managers viii, 17–18, 21, 27, 72, 86, 89, 113, 165, 171, 187–8, 190, 198, 200, 202, 204   narrative(s) 85–6   regulation 57, 64, 68, 92, 114–15, 126, 129, 135–8, 140, 156–175 passim, 185–92, 201, 203–4, 207   regulators 68–9, 112, 150, 166, 168–9, 175, 185, 188, 191, 197–207 passim risk aversion 86, 177 risk perception vi-ix, 13, 17, 20–1, 29, 87, 106, 114, 127–35 passim, 161, 165, 186, 188–90, 194–5, 199 risk politics vi–x, 17–18, 39, 43–4, 47–8, 54, 57, 62, 68, 72–90 passim, 92, 98, 112–15, 124–36 passim, 138, 141, 143, 160,

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Index 162–75 passim, 180–207 passim anticipation and 78, 141, 175, 203 cultural cognition and 189 cultural-evaluator model and 189–91, 195 deliberation(s) and x, 99–101, 135, 138–9 164, 172, 177–8, 188–206 passim   irrational-weigher model and 188   public participation in 130, 133, 138, 165, 193, 195–6, 205, 207   rational-weighers and 188–9   trust and viii, 17, 21, 23, 27, 50, 71–2, 84, 86–9, 107–8, 121, 159, 168, 171, 175, 189, 195, 201, 203, 207 Rothstein, H. 156, 161, 164–5, 203–5, 217 Rowell, A. 82, 95–6 Rowett Institute, The 90–1, 93–6 Royal Society, The 94, 96–7, 105, 110, 154, 172, 178        

Sainsbury of Turville, Lord 99 Sainsbury’s 4, 45 Salmonella (typhimurium enteritidis) vi, 5, 14, 26–7, 31–48 passim, 101, 163, 167, 171, 174, 196 Sandman, P.M. 128, 130–2 Schofield, R. 57, 62–8, 169 Scottish Office 53, 58, 61–2, 96 scrapie 72, 170 SEAC (Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee) 74–5 Shaoul, J. 57, 62–8, 169 Slovic, P. vi, viii, ix, 17, 84–9 passim, 106, 114, 127, 133–4, 136, 165, 173, 185–95 passim Snow, J. 7 Social Amplification of Risk Framework (SARF) vi, vii, 17, 127–37 passim, 173 social cascade(s) viii, 8, 34, 114, 128–9, 134–5, 137–8, 140–1, 144, 154, 173, 186 sociogenic illness, mass 114 Soil Association 4, 46, 88 Southwood, Sir Richard 74–5 Southwood Working Party 76, 85, 169–71, 197 specified bovine offal (SBO) 74–5, 83, 88, 169 Spratt, Sir Brian 155–6 Stanley Royd Hospital 60 State Veterinary Service 151 Stauber, J. 4, 157, 159–60 Stockholm Convention 117, 120 Sunstein, C.R. viii, ix, 20, 106, 114, 129, 136–8, 165, 185–95 passim   Laws of Fear, The 136, 185–6, 188, 190–1

Taverne, D. 164, 175–81 Taylor, I. 153 terminator gene 102 Tesco 4, 45 Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI)/Maximum Tolerable Daily Intake (MTDI) 10, 117, 119 traitor gene 102 transgenic animals 101 True Food Network 4 Tudge, C. 1 Tyrrell, R. 76 Understanding Risk Team, The 99–100 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 116 US Department of Agriculture 117, 122 US Department of Health and Human Services see ATSDR US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 122 US Office of Science (Department of Energy) see Office of Science vaccination (against FMD) 142, 144, 147–9, 154, 157, 160–1, 174–5 van Larebeke, N. 118–19, 122 van Zwanenberg, P. 27, 29, 77, 84–6, 169–71 variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD) vi, 1–2, 15, 27, 49, 70–89 passim, 123, 169, 171 Vere, Mrs Wendy 153 Verkest 121 Veterinary Laboratory Service (VLS) 72 vibrio cholerae 171 Weale, A. ix, 165, 195–6, 198–9, 207 When Food Kills 26, 49, 60 Whitehouse, D. 97 Wildavsky, A. 20, 173, 189 Wishaw (in Scotland) 49–54, 56–9, 61–2, 68, 72, 171 Woods, A. 13, 29, 157–8   Manufactured Plague, A 29, 157–8 Woollacott, M. 143–4 World Health Organization (WHO) 19, 80, 116–17, 119 World Trade Organization (WTO) 13, 18–19, 80 zero risk 113 zoonoses 72

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