Food agencies as an institutional response to policy failure by the UK and the EU

Abstract

The UK public’s confidence in the quality of the modern food supply, and in the governance of that supply, took a buffeting through a series of food safety crises in the 1980s and 1990s. The much-quoted list ranged from pesticide residues to salmonella in eggs, to BSE (which was estimated as a cost of over £4 billion to the public purse) and E.coli 0157. The internal market of the EU shared in some of those incidents, notably that of BSE, and added others such as dioxin contamination and nitrofurans in feed and poultry in the 1990s and into the early