EFSA wins more funds as its workload mushrooms

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is to receive substantially more funding this year to cope with its increasing workload, which will now include scientific assessments on nutrition and health claims as well food safety risks.

EFSA has just received approval from the European Parliament for the 2007 budget proposed by its management board of euro 51.6M, with a reserve of euro 9.5M if it can provide evidence by mid-May that this extra funding is necessary to meet its expanded obligations. EFSA’s expenditure last year was euro 40.3M.

“We have an increasing workload,” said EFSA executive director Catherine Geslaine-Lanéelle. “The member states, the Commission and the European Parliament are asking more and more questions of us; we are being asked for more advice before regulations are introduced.”

Geslaine-Lanéelle told the CIES - The Food Business Forum’s international food conference in Munich last week - that EFSA’s task under the new nutrition and health claims regulation would be “quite challenging”. She said: “We expect several hundreds of health and nutrition claims and a huge workload. But I am confident [of meeting the challenge], since we have a panel of [17] scientists to work on this and new experts coming in.”

Speaking to Food Manufacture​, Geslaine-Lanéelle said: “I am confident that if we need more budgetary resources, we will get them.” She admitted that EFSA’s panel of experts working on health claims was “missing some disciplines”, which she hoped to fill, while recruiting more support staff to cope with the increased workload. “It’s not only the panel, I will have more internal resources dedicated to nutrition. Basically I am going to double the team working on nutrition.”

Initially, she said, EFSA would concentrate on the new nutrition and health claims regulation, but over time it would expand its activities in nutrition. She added: “We don’t want to do everything: I think that member states have a special, specific responsibility on that because in Europe you have a diversity of diets and diverse attitudes to food. Everything cannot be done - and shouldn’t be done - at a European level.”

EFSA has yet to receive its mandate from the European Commission for establishing scientific advice that it must provide for the nutrient profile of foods under the regulation. “We should receive that very soon,” she said. Once the mandate is received, EFSA will have 12 months to develop nutrient profiles for different food categories. In the meantime it is also working on guidelines for the food industry, which will enable companies to provide the requisite information on their products to substantiate any health claims made.

EFSA currently employs 232 staff at its base in Parma in Italy, of whom 60% are scientists, and it plans to increase this number to nearly 350 by the end of this year, rising to 450 by 2010, said Geslaine-Lanéelle. She was confident that earlier obstacles to the recruitment of scientists - such as poor transport links and the need for international school facilities for their children in Parma - had now been overcome.