The half-day MoniQA-EC workshop entitled “Recent developments on the methodology on assessing the socio-economic impact of European food safety regulations” was held in Brussels on 20 October 2009. 18 representatives from various DGs (Enterprise, SANCO, Environment, including 1 representative from EFSA) and 11 colleagues from MoniQA attended the workshop.
The MoniQA coordinator, Roland Poms (ICC), explained how the socio-economic assessment work (WP7) contributes to the aims of the Network and illustrated the state of integration between social scientists and life scientists within the project. The WP7 leader Mario Mazzocchi (UNIBO) focussed on practical issues, potential solutions and unresolved problems in impact assessment of food safety regulations. The rationale of the WP7 plan is that the variety of issues faced by evaluators (e.g. data issues, the difficulty of predicting distributional effects and time patterns, etc.) can be addressed by a transparent and comprehensive evaluation toolbox, rather than a single specific impact assessment strategy. The case-study on maximum limits of T-2/HT-2 toxins in cereals was presented as a practical example for the evaluation toolbox to be tested.
Liana Giorgi (ICCR) illustrated real case-studies that are being carried out for the implementation of a generic evaluation framework on a country level: dioxin testing in EU, melamine in dairy in China, aflatoxins in hazelnuts in Turkey, T2/HT2 in cereals in Italy. Gerhard Schiefer and Melanie Fritz (UniBonn) presented the first prototype of the decision-support system, which employs filters to reduce complexity, reliability indicators to signal the reliability of results, and presents quantitative and qualitative impacts through clusters of (disaggregated) indicators on each level of analysis (society, individual firms, etc.) and could serve as ‘decision tables’ for policy decision support. At the end of the presentations, all participants interacted to exchange information and willingness to cooperate (especially on case-studies) for the MoniQA socio-economic research.
report_EC-MoniQA_workshop.pdf
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