UK Food Safety Can Go on the List of Brexit Woes, Study Finds

The effectiveness of the UK’s regulatory body overseeing food safety is being questioned by an academic study that found plentiful conflicts of interests among advisers.

Leaving the EU meant saying goodbye to the European Food Safety Authority. The trouble with that, according to Professor Erik Millstone of the University of Sussex, is the decision-making process of committees at the UK’s Dept for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and the Food Standards Agency could be compromised. In most expert advisory panels, those declaring conflicts of interest, including commercial ties to companies, outnumbered those that didn’t.

Trust in UK institutions has generally ebbed away, according to a YouGov poll in July 2022.

Millstone’s findings were published in Pesticide News, distributed by the Pesticide Action Network UK.