This chapter is dedicated to those activities carried out solely by assessors, largely EFSA, focusing on the work of EFSA under the proposed General Framework. As has already been mentioned, the first activity, screening, involves the identification of the most appropriate assessment approach for the threat in question. Detailed criteria for screening threats are developed during the process of review, as mentioned briefly in the previous chapter; the actual use of these criteria will be treated in more detail in Sect. 4.2, below. The various aspects of the actual assessment process, how they relate to the legal and institutional requirements of good governance outlined in Sect. 1.2.2, and how they can help to overcome the challenges outlined in Sect. 1.3, will then be addressed in Sect. 4.3.
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- 1.
For example, Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.
- 2.
The third subproject of the SAFE FOODS project has adopted probabilistic techniques to model the health impacts on European populations to pesticide, mycotoxin and natural toxin exposures. Where probabilistic risk assessment is applied, it should not be used inappropriately as an aggregative tool exclusively to justify or enforce ostensibly definitive monolithic claims to safety or to the unitary sufficiency of intervention measures. Sensitivity analysis (both analysing the effect of data and model uncertainty on the assessment) is an essential part of such quantitative techniques and is recognised as such by other subprojects in SAFE FOODS. While subproject 3 has reported adequate data in relation to pesticides, data on mycotoxins and natural toxins have been poor both in availability and quality (Subproject 3 report-back session, SAFE FOODS Consortium Meeting, Pretoria, South Africa, 25 May 2006). Especially under such circumstances, where the scarcity of data means that assessment must be assumption- (rather than data-) driven, uncertainty criteria may in addition be triggered (necessitating a precautionary approach to assessment).
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Ely, A., Stirling, A. (2009). The Process of Assessment. In: Renn, O., Dreyer, M. (eds) Food Safety Governance. Risk, Governance and Society, vol 15. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69309-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69309-3_5
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