Is it just about trust ? The partial reform of French food safety regulation
Résumé
Food safety has been a state prerogative in France in
the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet it became a
major political issue only recently, gaining top priority
on the political agenda in the wake of the BSE crisis of
1996. Two reasons account for this. First, the BSE crisis
revealed important dysfuntions in both beef industry
practices and their supervision by the state, echoing
similar dysfuntions in the UK and later Germany, and
undermining public trust toward food products.
Second, the blood transfusion scandal of the mid-
1980s, with its political and administrative
repercussions, promoted health safety as a priority on
the political agenda along with issues of political
accountability. To most observers, BSE seemed to
reproduce the same mecanisms as the blood
transfusion scandal, albeit in a different sector, but
typical of a snow-balling of crises (see chapter 1, this
volume). Food safety became a sub-category of the
more general theme of health safety. [first paragraph]