White Paper on Food Safety

Commission of the European Communities White Paper on Food Safety, COM (1999) 719 final, Brussels, 12 January 2000. 

The characterisation of health hazards of food contaminants, the assessment of the occurrence of undesirable compounds in food and the estimation of the dietary intake are key issues in the risk assessment. In 2000, the European Commission published a White Paper on Food Safety, which underlined the importance of ensuring the highest possible standards of food safety and proposed a new approach to achieve them. Recently, PFCs have gained increased scientific and socioeconomic interest as emerging environmental contaminants due to the unique combination of persistence, toxicity and environmental prevalence. Risk assessment of the dietary exposure to PFCs, however, is hampered by the lack of sufficient data about the occurrence of these contaminants in food. 

EES A. 2006. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) website. http /www.efsa.europa.eu EU. 2000. Communication from the Commission on the Precautionary Principle. Brussels, 2.02.2000, COM (2000) 1. http /ec.europa.eu/dgs/health consumer/library/pub/pub07 en.pdf EU. 2001. White Paper on the Strategy for a Future Chemicals Policy, http //ec.europa.eu/consumers/ cons safe/prod safe/other EU/chem policy en.htm... 

The efforts of the EU in the safety and quality context can also be seen in the publication of many reports such as From the farm to the fork [29] and in the adoption of the White paper on the food safety [30] or the Green paper [31]. In this case, the Commission sets out the general principles on which the European food safety policy should be based with the aim to achieve the highest possible level of health protection for consumers. 

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