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This report aims to make a contribution to the reform process to which European food safety governance is currently being subjected. It provides suggestions for procedural and institutional reforms which focus on the challenges of the policy-science interface, precaution, and participation.

It is not the intention of this report to reinvent the wheel but rather to tie in with recent reforms at the EU-level and to build on previous studies in particular those carried out or commissioned by the European Commission and the European Food Safety Authority. The authors of this report have placed special emphasis on the compatibility of their suggestions with the existing EU regulations on food safety, the European Commission’s communications on governance and on precaution, and with the guidelines developed by Codex Alimentarius. With regard to the aspects of participation and deliberation in particular, the report is inspired by the 2005 International Risk Governance Council’s White Paper on Risk Governance 1 and by the 1996 National Research Council’s report on risk characterization 2 both in which science, politics, economic actors, and representatives of civil society are invited to play a role in both the assessment and the management of risks. The authors have made a special effort to keep the number of new terms to an absolute minimum and to use existing concepts and terms in a way consistent with these documents.