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Introduction
One goal of risk communication on food safety issues (among many) is communication between risk assessors and risk managers and the average citizen. This dimension includes both communication with the citizenry as a whole, through the mass media and other widely disseminated information, and communication with consumer organizations that participate in the risk analysis/risk management process.
Communication in this dimension is a two-way street, with two rather symmetrical objectives. On one hand, the expert, policy-making community wants to communicate the substance of and the basis for its decisions to the public, to foster understanding and acceptance of food safety decisions. On the other hand, the public, or segments actively concerned about food safety and seeking to influence the risk-management process, need to communicate their own scientific interpretations, as well as their criteria for decisions and their priorities, to decision makers.
Effective communication requires mutual understanding of both one’s own goals and perceptions about the issues and the communication process, and those of the parties with whom one wishes to communicate. While the focus of this paper is primarily on consumer perceptions of risk and of the risk analysis process, it is essential as well to examine attitudes, beliefs and perceptions within the expert, policy-making sector that affect our ability to communicate about our work with the general public.
Consumer Perceptions of Risks
Over the past three decades, social scientists have studied the ways in which average citizens perceive risks, and have shown clearly that the public tends to view risks differently than "experts" (i.e., the scientific and policy-making communities) view them (NRC 1989; Slovic 1990).
It is important at this point to emphasize that "different" does not mean "wrong." To say that consumers perceive risks differently than we experts do is not to say that they—or we—misperceive risks. In fact, risks have many attributes. Scientists and regulators tend, for a variety of good reasons, to focus on measurable, quantifiable attributes of risks. Ordinary consumers tend, for equally good reasons, to focus less on the quantitative aspects of risks, and also to respond to qualitative, value-laden attributes of risks, things like fairness and controllability, which the expert community tends to ignore (Groth 1991). To express this in the jargon currently fashionable in Codex contexts, the experts tend to emphasize risk assessment, while most typical consumers, while not inattentive to risk assessment, are also quite concerned with "factors other than science that should legitimately be weighed in risk management."
Paul Slovic, whose research on public perceptions of risks over two decades has done much to define the field, has identified a large number of qualitative and value attributes of risks that affect how the public perceives different risks. Slovic defines a "risk space" with two main dimensions (see Figure 1). On one axis, risks are ranked from "known" to "unknown." On this dimension are factors such as whether consumers are familiar with a risk or whether it is novel; whether it is observable by consumers, well known to science, and the like. On the other axis, risks are ranked from "dreaded" to "not dreaded." Captured within this dimension are factors including whether a risk is voluntarily assumed or involuntary; whether individuals can control their own risk, whether it is equitably distributed; whether it has potential for catastrophic consequences; and other attributes (Slovic 1987.)
Slovic’s work shows that the farther a risk falls toward the "dreaded" end of that axis, the higher the perceived risk, and the more people want to see the risk reduced, including by regulation. As Slovic himself says, while these public perceptions of risk may not exactly match experts’ narrower, quantitative definitions, the public’s perceptions are in fact quite rational; they are merely wider, more qualitative and complex than experts’ perceptions of risks, and they incorporate legitimate value-laden considerations that are valid dimensions of risks (Slovic 1990).
Peter Sandman, an American expert on Risk Communication, has coined the term "outrage" to encompass many of the qualitative dimensions of risks documented by Slovic and others. In Sandman’s terms, "hazard" is the quantitative, measurable aspect of a risk—how likely it is to kill you—while "outrage" is all the attributes of a risk that determine how likely it is to worry you or make you angry. Sandman points out that although the public often seems concerned with "outrage" at the expense of "hazard," the expert community often ignores "outrage," at its own peril. Sandman also observes that process issues affect outrage. If the public feels its legitimate concerns are not being addressed by the risk-management process, the outrage level—and the intensity of public concern with the risk—will be greater than when the public feels listened to (Sandman 1987).
What are the implications of these differing perceptions of risks for food safety risk communication? Many in the expert community have long believed that the public does not understand food safety risks. In a classic paper published more than 25 years ago, the then U.S. FDA official Virgil Wodicka observed that, from the standpoint of science, the major food safety concerns, ranked in descending order of public health hazards, are:
(1) Excessive fat/excess calorie intake
(2) Microbiological contamination
(3) Natural toxicants in foods
(4) Pesticide residues and other chemical contaminants
(5) Food additives
Yet, Wodicka observed, when public opinion surveys asked consumers what food safety issues concerned them, food additives and pesticides consistently were named as the greatest concerns, far outstripping the other three. While increased media attention to microbial contaminants in recent years has now elevated public concern about that risk, many other leaders of the food safety community have repeated Wodicka’s observation since he first made it. In general, they have concluded that the public misperceives the relative sizes of food-related risks, that consumers have inverted priorities. Since citizens’ priorities, expressed to elected officials, can affect both legislative mandates and budgets of food safety agencies, it is quite legitimate to worry that the political process may be mis-allocating limited resources. If that is so, risk communication’s main goal might be to try to make consumers understand the relative seriousness of risks, so that the public’s priorities would better match those of the food safety agencies whose job it is to protect the public.
However, there is less evidence that the public’s priorities are askew than Wodicka and his many successors may have assumed. It is often said, regarding public-opinion surveys, that the answer one gets depends on the question one asks (and for an excellent discussion of this in the context of risk communica-tion, see Fischoff 1989.) In 1992, the opinion research firm Porter/Novelli conducted a survey on food safety issues for the Center for Produce Quality (CPQ 1992). As earlier surveys had, they asked consumers how concerned they were with various food safety problems. The results (shown in Figure 2) found a high percentage "very concerned" with many issues. Nutritional value and bacterial contamination led the list, followed closely by fat, pesticides, salmonella and several other issues. In a way, this affirmed Wodicka’s per-ception; i.e., pesticide residues ranked about as high as bacterial contaminants. But when the survey asked the same respondents to indicate how confident they were in the safety of a list of foods, responses ranked problems in the same order most experts would rank them (Figure 3). Fresh fruits and vegetables were top-ranked for safety (seen as "safe" by 94 and 95 percent of respondents), while foods likely to be contaminated with bacteria (meat, poultry and fresh fish) scored substantially lower. (A large majority still considered these foods "safe," however, indicating high overall confidence in the safety of most foods.)
Let’s reflect on what this means. The public apparently understands food safety risks better than we’ve realized. Consumers can tell large risks from small ones, and do not appear excessively worried that foods in general are unsafe. But at the same time, consumers say they are more "concerned" about certain small risks than they are about some other, larger risks. Is this "irrational"? Not at all. The key is apparently that what makes scientists and regulators concerned about a risk is how many people it harms, whereas public concern with risks reflects something else. My inference is that since risks like pesticide residues and food additives are invisible, involuntary, and consumers have no control over how much they are exposed to them, the public expects and wants government agencies to be concerned with these risks, even though they are small. On the other hand, when it comes to food-borne pathogens, fat intake and certain other food-related risks, consumers perceive that they can protect themselves, they feel responsible for their own safety, and therefore are less likely to demand that government protect them. If indeed these risk perceptions explain the public’s "concern" with assorted food safety problems, the public’s priorities are actually rather sensible and less likely to mis-allocate resources than we may have perceived them to be.
Further data relevant to this point emerged from a survey conducted by Consumers Union in 1996 (Langlois and Groth 1996). We wanted to learn whether people could accurately rank risks, and whether their levels of concern about hazards matched their perceptions of the sizes of risks. For reasons of economy and convenience, we surveyed the staff at Consumers Union’s Yonkers, NY headquarters, who are better educated and higher in income than the U.S. population as a whole, so results cannot be generalized to the wider public. Nevertheless, we found some interesting things.
The first part of our survey asked people how concerned they were about each item on a list of 44 "hazards of life." When they had completed that task, we asked them to estimate how many people died each year from each hazard on the list in the United States.
We used the "concern" scores to rank the risks from most concern to least concern, then compared that ranking with a ranking of the same risks based on documentable (or scientifically estimated) annual mortality. There was a strong correlation between the level of concern about a risk and its actual size, in mortality terms. Figure 4 compares the level of concern our survey found about risks with the actual mortality. Note that no risks are low in mortality but high in concern, or vice-versa; in general, the levels of concern seem appropriate to the measurable levels of risk. Certain risks that, in Slovic’s surveys, fall high on the "dreaded risk" axis, such as radiation from nuclear power plants, scored slightly higher in concern than their expected mortality warrants. But no such small risks scored high in concern level.
Figure 5 shows our respondents’ expressed levels of concern with the nine food- (and water-) related risks on our list of 44 hazards. Both the raw level of concern expressed and the relative ranking of risks seem very much in line with the actual size of the risks, generally speaking. These risks fell into three clus-ters with respect to concern level—two (high-fat diets and alcoholic beverage consumption) were in the "high concern" group; two (pesticide residues and food poisoning bacteria) were in the "moderate concern" group; and the other five (aflatoxin, saccharin, food irradiation, water chlorination and water fluori-dation), fell into the group with the lowest level of concern. The overall ranking was very sound. While the moderate level of concern for pesticides was no surprise, the low scores given to controversial issues like food irradiation and fluoridation were a bit unexpected.
Our respondents’ estimates of annual mortality from various causes were frequently wildly inaccurate. Even well educated, middle-class people who work for a consumer information organization apparently cannot quantify risks very well. People’s guesses were also very divergent; estimates recorded by the survey respondents as a whole ranged over five or six orders of magnitude for individual risks. Nevertheless, when we looked at several selected triads, made up of one large risk, one moderate one, and one small one (based on actual mortality), we found that large majorities—75 to 90 percent—had ranked the sets in correct order. In other words, despite the imprecision of their estimates, people’s guesses about the relative sizes of risks were quite accurate, on the whole.
In summary, it is clear that consumers and scientists perceive risks differently. Ordinary citizens generally do not have a good quantitative grasp on risk, and they are sensitive to and concerned about many aspects of risks that science cannot quantify. Nevertheless, it appears that the average citizen understands a lot more about risks than we experts often give them credit for. Based on some recent evidence, citizens do know the difference between large risks and small ones, and understand the relative size of risks rather well. Differences between the public’s and the expert community’s perceptions of how important various risks are, and perhaps how acceptable they are, need to be brought closer together, so that both food safety officials and the public can be confident that policies are in the public’s best interests. Closing this perception gap is a logical priority for risk communication.
Barriers to Communication
The differing perceptions of risks on the part of experts and average consumers are just one reason why the two groups have often found it hard to communicate effectively about food-related risks. As Fischoff (1989) has observed, experts and consumers "speak different languages" about risk, and may have very different ideas regarding the purpose of the process of risk management, the problem to be solved. Here are some specific ways in which food safety risk communication can encounter difficulty:
(a) Differing Goals of Communication
Experts often approach risk communication with the explicit goal of "educating" the public; that is, of explaining the experts’ perceptions of the risks in question so clearly that the public will understand the risk the same way the experts do. To the extent that this goal is based on mistaken beliefs—such as that the public doesn’t understand or misperceives risks, or that the level of public concern with a risk is irrational because it is based on other than scientific understanding—these communication efforts will for the most part fail to achieve their goal.
Consumer organizations and ordinary citizens, on the other hand, tend to approach risk communication as a matter of "process." They may already understand the size of the risk, as well as much of the underlying science and its inherent uncertainties. They often feel no need to be "educated" on that score, but approach communication with the goal of ensuring that decision-makers pay adequate attention to their concerns about a risk—often such things as whether the benefits justify accepting the risks, or whether there is adequate information for consumers to make choices in the marketplace and to manage their own risks in the case in question. Consumer activists’ goal in risk communication is typically to have these concerns taken seriously.
These different goals of communication can have the two groups "talking past each other," under the best of circumstances. Under less than optimum conditions, the experts’ focus on "educating" consumers instead of listening to their legitimate concerns may make effective communication all but impossible.
(b) Covert Value Judgments
Many things that experts treat as "scientific facts" about risks are in truth value judgments; they are what Fischoff calls "opinions of experts," as opposed to expert opinions. A typical case arises when there is some scientific evidence that a particular food technology may pose a particular risk, but not enough data to say for sure that there is a risk, let alone to quantify the hypothesized risk. Most experts might conclude that, since there is no factual basis for measuring the risk, it does not exist, and the technology is therefore safe (and, the presumed benefits should be given greater weight). Many consumers would conclude—with more scientific rigor, perhaps—that we can’t say, based on science, whether the technology is safe or not. They are also more likely to reach a value judgment that society should wait until we are more certain of safety before using the technology.
Most debates over food safety are really about value judgments of this sort. Science inevitably can’t answer all questions about risks, sometimes it can’t even answer all the important questions—and yet, decisions have to be made, to regulate and to market food technologies. Unfortunately, for legal and traditional reasons, regulators and expert advisory bodies are rarely able to state openly that the science was rather ambiguous on several points, so they made a value choice to deal with uncertainties. Decisions are presented as if they are backed by relatively conclusive science, even when this is not actually the case.
In reality, and in part because they are covert, and are rarely debated openly, people’s positions on value issues underlying food safety debates are often incoherent, and not clearly formulated (see Fischoff 1989). Nevertheless, defining food safety decisions as needing to be based "on science," or even worse, making science the sole basis for such decisions, excludes from debate legitimate issues that need serious and open debate. When attention is diverted from the value choices society must make in the face of scientific uncertainty, the basis for decisions may be poorly explained (at times, even to decision-makers), and debates will often continue unresolved, despite the decisions that are made.
(c) Structural Barriers to Communication
Closely related to covert values in "scientific" communication is the frequently-encountered problem of a mismatch between risk issues and the forums in which they are debated. In many cases, consumers’ main concern may be that, given all that is known and not known about benefits and risks of a food technology, society probably would be better off on the whole if it were not used. This general sense of lack of overall need for technologies whose risks are incompletely understood probably underlies major consumer concerns about the use of growth hormones in meat production, about food irradiation, about genet-ically engineered foods, and about many other current food safety controversies.
Unfortunately there is no particular forum in which citizens can make a comprehensive case that, all things considered, it might be a good idea for society to forego the benefits of a particular technology. Instead, bodies like the US FDA, other national and regional food safety authorities, and Codex are given specific, narrow mandates—to determine whether the intended use of a technology is safe for public health, generally. Consumers who wish to argue that the pace of technological change should be more measured or that the expected distribution of risks and benefits of new technologies is unfair and therefore socially unacceptable, find that these issues are, literally, not part of the agenda of the decision-making bodies. The law, the expertise of the people charged with making food safety decisions, the mandates given to food safety agencies by legislators, and decades of tradition all have focused debate on much narrower issues.
This mismatch between issues and forums has had the perverse effect of driving most value issues farther "underground." If one wants to argue, say, that using bovine growth hormone to increase milk production is not in the overall best interests of society, yet the only forum for debate defines the question narrowly as whether using bGH is safe, then one more or less must argue that using bGH is unsafe—even if, as I believe is the case here, human health safety issues are merely a part of the complex reasons people think bGH use is a bad idea. (Symmetrically, if one believes the social value of bGH use vastly outweighs its risks, one is also more or less constrained to argue only that scientific evidence proves bGH use is safe, and ignore wider social concerns.) When the safety debate is the only game in town, it must carry the weight of the many and complex value issues that, by definition, are not on the table for debate.
Structural barriers, in the form of legal and political mandates given to food safety decision-makers, can thus make communication more difficult, making it harder for all participants to talk about what really concerns them.
(d) Distrust
Perhaps the most important barrier to communication in food safety debates is mutual distrust between experts, on one hand, and consumers on the other. Distrust of the motives, attitudes and beliefs of the "other side" makes it difficult to listen to, let alone to accept and respond respectfully to, what one’s opposite number is trying to communicate.
As we have seen in earlier sections, many experts distrust the average citizen’s ability to understand risks. Experts often also believe, sometimes correctly, that consumers do not understand the purposes and processes of the risk management institutions in which the experts are engaged. They fear, again with some basis, that the public wants to debate value questions that are outside the limits of what the expert body can decide. They regard public concern with these issues, rather than with "science," as a threat to "politicize" the process, and diminish the role of objective methods in supporting decisions. Overall, seasoned expert participants in processes like Codex may view consumer activists seeking a role in the process as inexperienced newcomers who don’t understand or respect the institutions, and cannot be trusted to play by the established rules. At the very least, these invaders will soon demand that the rules be changed to better accommodate consumers’ interests.
The public, for its part, is appropriately distrustful of "science." This is not to say that the public rejects good science, but rather that consumers are often more mindful than experts are of the limits of science. They know how often experts have been wrong, how yesterday’s orthodoxy is today’s heresy, how unsuspected risks have emerged for many technologies whose proponents initially predicted only benefits. The public is also aware that scientists make social judgments, just like everyone else, and is skeptical of arguments presented as "good science" that are in fact heavily value-laden.
Beyond this "conventional wisdom," most consumer activists who have tried to take part in food safety debates have experienced being told by some of the experts with whom they sought to communicate that the public does not understand risks, that consumers are driven by "irrational fears of technology," and that they (consumer activists) are not qualified to "join the club"—i.e., to play a meaningful role in making food safety decisions. Such arrogant and insensitive attitudes—which are becoming rarer, but still exist—obviously don’t foster mutual trust.
Consumers often have reasons to distrust the institutions that make food safety decisions, as well. When the way the problem is defined and the ways in which agendas for debate are structured effectively exclude perspectives that are central concerns of consumers, members of the public understandably don’t believe the institutions have their interests foremost in mind. The public in general perceives—often quite accurately—that food safety decision-making processes are dominated by industry and government experts. Consumers don’t regard either group as especially trustworthy—corporations because of their perceived concern with profits, and public servants because of widely accepted (though sometimes unfair) stereotypes about bureaucracies. Food safety descision-making processes that lack openness to public participation, and the lack of transparency about the basis for decisions, are additional reasons why consumers mistrust the food-safety risk-management process, and those who take part in it.
There is also, in international food safety contexts, a North/South (or more-powerful/less-powerful) dimension to distrust. Consumers, and even governments, from many developing countries have observed that an elite group of experts from a handful of the richest and most scientifically advanced nations have long dominated the Codex process, and continue to make most of the key decisions. As "outsiders," those not traditionally part of the decision-making core tend to distrust the decisions made by those who are.
In summary, there are many reasons why we distrust each other, some of which have at least a partial basis in fact, and most of which are deeply ingrained in our attitudes toward each other and about the roles we play in food safety risk management. Nor is distrust independent of the other barriers described above. Observations of these barriers only make consumers less trustful of the process.
Recommendations: Paths Forward
Many books have been written about improving risk communication (e.g., Davies et al. 1987, NAS 1989); the recommendations here are my own selected, personal suggestions specifically crafted for the Codex context.
(1) Know Your Audience
An obvious and crucial rule, this applies to participants on all sides: With whom are you trying to communicate? For the experts "inside" the system, that means determining whether your goal is to communicate with the general public through the mass media, whether you wish to establish better lines of communi-cation with consumer activists taking part in your food safety risk-management processes, or some combination of both. For consumers seeking to participate more fully in Codex decisions, for example, this means knowing what your message is and who within the Codex system is—or should be—listening to it. Directing comments to JECFA on issues that the Codex Committee on General Principles should be discussing would be an example of not knowing your audience.
Beyond knowing in general who your audience is, it is necessary to actually get to know them—as groups, and as individuals. What is their background and training? What is their expertise? What do they know, how well do they know it, and how well can they explain it to you? What do they care most about? Through efforts actually to come to know each other, both as people and as role-players in the process, we can all begin to define those areas where our interests intersect, where we can make progress in communicating, and where we can experience success at solving problems in mutually satis-factory ways. Such small steps are an essential start.
(2) Actively Practice Democracy
Never underestimate the importance of openness and transparency; it is vital not only that processes be open and transparent, but also that it be clear to consumers that they are so—and that citizens have a right to be there, and are welcome participants. This atmosphere is impossible to "fake;" until it is established and is genuine, it will be hard to build mutual trust.
(3) Define Problems More Openly
Keeping in mind that risk-management is a political activity carried out by democratic societies, some collective sense of what the risk is that is to be managed, and what the acceptable range of options should be, is essential for the ultimate decisions to be widely accepted by the public.
Clearly "democracy" cannot be allowed to define as the task for Codex, something the Codex charter does not allow Codex to do. But many examples can be found in which consumer participation in defining the goal of a risk-management process would improve the process and could lead to better (safer, more economically sound) results. For example, the Codex Committee on Food Labeling has been struggling for several years with the labeling of foods derived from biotechnology. In that process the Codex secretariat has attempted to define "purposes of labeling," rather pointedly excluding supporting informed consumer choices in the marketplace as one of the stated purposes. Consumer organizations believe, in general, that the fundamental purpose of labels is to inform consumers. The fact that CCFL attempted to define the "purposes of labeling" without asking consumers what concerns they felt labeling should address struck Consumers International as a rather extreme example of an inappropriately "closed" process.
Another example concerns the Codex Committee on Food Additives and Contaminants’ deliberations about lead levels in foods. Discussion has focused only on the issue of establishing MRL’s for lead in specific foods. If the prob-lem were defined differently, to include the question of whether lead-soldered cans should be permitted at all, the options would include at least one—an international phase-out or ban of leaded cans—with potential to reduce dietary exposure to lead by an order of magnitude. But CCFAC has resisted public efforts to broaden the definition of the problem, and has looked only at the need for MRLs, which would have little overall impact on dietary lead exposure.
Clearly, a discussion of what the problem is that we’re all trying to solve and what solutions are "on the table" is a pivotal part of communicating about food safety. Consumers often find that such decisions have been made and are not subject to discussion. For communication to improve, it is important to work on changing this, to ensure that policymakers and the public share some mutual sense of the goals and scope of a particular risk-management process.
(4) Recognize That Safety is Relative
All parties can communicate better if they remind each other that food technologies and foods are not "safe" or "unsafe," in absolute terms. Instead what is usually at issue in safety debates is whether the food, or technology, is "safe enough." Generally speaking, this latter judgment requires either some balancing of risks and benefits, or some comparison of the risk under consideration with other, similar risks that are judged either acceptable or unacceptable; often both are involved.
Defining the key safety question as "safe enough?" forces parties on both sides to discuss the value components of the decision, as well as what is known and not known on the scientific side. It is a major step toward more effective and clear communication.
(5) Deal With Uncertainty More Explicitly
In assembling scientific risk assessments, more explicit attention should be paid to identifying uncertainties, and their significance. Expert groups like JECFA and JMPR need to be pressed to say not only what is known, but also what is not known, and what the consequences of those identifiable areas of ignorance could be.
If experts do a better job of identifying and perhaps quantifying the uncertainties inherent in their science, consumers and policymakers can do a more explicit job of discussing not just what the science shows, but how sure we are of that, and what the consequences could be if we are wrong. These are issues about which communication is often difficult or indirect at best; improved communication requires examining them openly and doing the best we can to come up with satisfactory answers.
(6) Separate Values and Science
It has been said many times that it is both essential and impossible to separate "facts" from "values" in risk-management debates. At a practical level, it would be very useful, and would greatly improve communication, if experts and advisory groups were required to make statements to the effect of, "Up to this point, the facts are clear. Beyond that, we are guessing. On the following issues, we cannot provide unequivocal scientific answers, but we have made the following judgments." Where those judgments are value choices that citizens make, not expert opinions—for example, a belief that in the absence of more concrete evidence of harm, those who believe in benefits of a technology should be allowed to use it—they should be identified as such, to the extent possible.
Consumers also need to pay more attention to defining the value judgments that are enmeshed in their views on food safety questions; they are often at least as inarticulate in this respect as experts are.
Improved communication can result from a two-step process. First, participants, both lay and expert, need to determine to what extent they have a common understanding of "the science:" What are the agreed-upon facts, what are tentative conclusions supported by less than conclusive proof, what are valid hypotheses on which there too few data to reach even tentative conclusions, etc? The effort to achieve a "consensus" view of what the facts are can go a long way toward ensuring that there is indeed a mutual understanding of the scientific basis for decisions, and that the public’s and the experts’ views are not far apart on these questions. If it turns out that the public does not accept the experts' view of what the scientific facts are, it is also essential to get that issue "on the table," rather than presume a consensus that does not exist.
The second step is to identify crucial value issues that are inseparable from the facts of the case. Here, reaching consensus as to what should be done is less likely, and not a goal of the process. The goal instead is to get down, in concrete form, a list of the issues that people really believe need to be or should be decided, so that they may be examined and discussed. One outcome of this dialogue may be that issues that were once buried in debate over "scientific" issues can be extracted and set aside. For instance, it may become clear that Codex can decide what level of risk is acceptable if a new food technology is used, but that market forces will determine whether and to what extent society chooses to use it. That clarity could free the Codex debate to focus on defining an acceptable level of risk, and set aside the issue of whether society should use the technology for another forum.
(7) Identify Other Forums for Wider Debates
To help protect Codex debates from digressions into disputes over value choices that are not within the Codex purview, it is essential first to identify those value issues (as in (6), above), and then to identify proper forums where they can and should be debated. Sometimes, value issues seem to require legislation to set a clearer course for society, in which case the debate should be taken up with elected officials. In other cases, it may be that the debate needs to be taken to the court of public opinion, to raise issues that will affect "market forces."
I believe it is appropriate for Codex officials to point out that some issues brought before them are more appropriately discussed in some other forums. And, to avoid giving the impression that Codex is merely trying to avoid having to deal with difficult issues, the Codex Commission should have some formal referral mechanisms, so that issues needing to be addressed by legislation could be referred to the European Parliament, to national governments, and to other appropriate bodies. Formal referrals with the imprimatur of the Codex Commission could, if used judiciously, promote an effective societal response to an issue that Codex itself was not equipped to resolve.
(8) Build Trust by Practicing Mutual Respect
Codex officials and consumer activists will grow to trust each other and learn to communicate and work together more effectively the same way a musician gets to Carnegie Hall—practice, practice, practice. Knowing the people you are dealing with is an essential first step, but only a first step. Beyond getting to know each other, we all have to continually work hard at listening to each other, being as humble as we can, and actively showing respect for the roles and views of our colleagues on all sides—even when, or especially when, we don’t agree with all they are saying.
It has long been my personal view that while everyone talks to the government, the different non-governmental parties—especially consumer organizations and industry—don’t talk to each other enough. Often their only interaction is indirect, making opposing arguments in deliberations of bodies like Codex. Better communication between industry and consumers would be beneficial to both, and to the process of finding social consensus on how to approach and manage food-related risks. Traditional distrust between the parties, and pragmatic problems (such as the shortage of very knowledgeable consumer food safety spokespeople, and the low priority their organizations generally give to building bridges with industry) have long kept this communication gulf open wide. It represents an opportunity for substantial progress in risk communication, if creative people of good will on both sides can find practical ways to move forward.
References
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