Food producers and farmers have to face up to a new world where they will be held liable if they generate defective produce under stringent EU legislation designed to protect consumers, an EU food law expert has warned.
At a conference in Dublin yesterday, Mr Raymond O'Rourke of Mason Hayes & Curran solicitors said food companies - large coops in particular - needed to be more aware of the product liability directive which has been extended to cover "primary agricultural products". The Government has until December 2000 to transpose the amendment into law.
Should, for example, a farmer allow defective or contaminated milk into the food chain, he would be held liable, but there would be a domino effect with liability implications also for the co-op he supplied with milk.
Co-ops were aware of the implications but had not anticipated them enough, he told the food law conference staged by Teagasc's National Food Centre and Leatherhead Food Research Association (a UK body which carries out research for food companies and supermarkets).
There would be situations where farmers would have to take out product liability cover, though as the first link in the food chain they had always insisted it was unfair for them to be implicated should problems arise further down the line. The EU view, post-BSE crisis, was that everyone in the food chain had responsibilities.
Increased attention by consumers to food safety would mean increased litigation against agricultural producers and, possibly, increased insurance premiums for them. With such a "strict liability system", producers would not escape liability by arguing they had complied with existing regulations and taken all the necessary precautions.
Mr O'Rourke, author of the recently published European Food Law, said amendments to enhance food safety are "certain to have a profound effect on Irish agriculture". Food safety and consumer health had become of paramount importance in the development of EU food law. The food industry would have to wake up to a future of "ever more regulation and oversight of their industry from Brussels".
There were some concerns whether the legislation was sufficient to protect consumer interests in biotechnology, especially with GM foods. There was a view that time limitations on product approval could unduly restrict legal actions. Thus, should an allergy develop with a particular GM food, its producer might avoid litigation by claiming there was no indication of such a problem at the time of its introduction.
Strong EU food safety regulation contrasted with "a woeful record on GM foods", he said. The recent introduction of what in effect was a moratorium on GM foods illustrated the mess that GM food regulation in Europe had become, as such a move came out of nowhere. Some member-states were going in different directions on the issue, while Ireland was "sitting on the fence".
The European Commission might point to its novel foods directive but had yet to set threshold limits for GM foods, which have implications for labelling them and identifying which is a GM product or not. "The new Prodi Commission has to get its act together very quickly on this."
The EU was going to get increasingly involved in food emergencies where a public health issue arose beyond an individual state. It was streamlining a "rapid alert system" to ensure co-operation and communication between the Commission and member-states. Notwithstanding Belgium's slow provision of information in the recent dioxin scandal, this was shown to work effectively in quickly taking products off the market to protect consumers, he said.
