if you thought Krebs had washed his hands of ensuring this country had a safe food supply...
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http://www.foodlink.org.uk/news.htm
National Food Safety Week 2001
11-17 June

Each year as part of the foodlink National Food Safety Week, locally based activities are arranged nationwide for consumers and school children, primarily by environmental health officers and health promotion teams in local authorities, local schools, companies and other interested groups.

The key focus in 2001 is on the importance of HAND WASHING. Food Standards Agency Chairman Professor Sir John Krebs launched the Week and the foodlink roadshow which tours the country (London, Swansea, Liverpool, Gateshead and Glasgow). The gruesome results of foodlink's survey on hand washing will also be revealed.
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Gruesome indeed... the FSA under Krebs has been not so much "a force for change" as "a source of spin"  

"...if the FSA is to be anything more than a useless and expensive clone of MAFF, it needs to represent informed consumer opinion. Post-BSE, consumers have shown very clearly what kind of food they trust: it's no coincidence, after all, that our supermarkets are now brimming with organic food, while GM food is being forced off the shelves. Yet the FSA seems to be pursuing a curiously contrary agenda..."  - Joanna Blythman writing in the Guardian , November 4, 2000  

What is the FSA's agenda under Krebs? Consider:

1. Sir John was known to be highly unsympathetic to concerns about GM foods before he was even appointed, dismissing them as "shrill, often ill-informed and dogma-driven".[1]  

2. The complete failure of the FSA under Krebs to re-examine the safety of GM foods, despite the high level of consumer concern. Business as usual was guaranteed by the FSA taking its advice from exactly the same old committee (ACNFP) as MAFF.  

3. Instead, quickly conducting a safety enquiry into organic food, which has a high level of consumer confidence. Krebs then made a high profile attack on organic food, in the words of The Times, as "an image-led fad"[2]. Dr Patrick Wall, the chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland described Krebs' views on organic food as "extreme"[3].  

4. The FSA's proposed research, supposedly monitoring the health effects of consuming GM foods, which epidemiologists have dismissed as "worthless"[4].  

5. Evidence that Krebs is far from alone at the FSA in terms of links to the biotech lobby. The director of the Scottish arm of the FSA is Dr George Paterson -- the former director general of Health Canada's Food Directorate. Paterson has been linked to major food safety scandals in Canada involving both fast track approval for a Monsanto GM crop and the overriding of internal government scientists' health warnings on a GM product.[5]  

6. Krebs' role as the OECD's GM conference chair in Edinburgh -- an occasion described by Dr Arpad Pusztai, the only critical food scientist invited, as not so much a conference more: "a propaganda forum for airing the views and promoting the interests of the biotech industry." [6]  

7. Krebs' collaboration with a pro-GM food-industry-funded body in their agenda-driven initiative to instruct journalists on how they should report issues like the GM debate.[7]  

Krebs has not only emasculated the agency but turned it into a public platform for his extreme support for GM and his antipathy to organic food.  

Krebs has put the "CON" into consumer protection!

Notes

[1] Quoted in Private Eye 10 March 2000

[2] The Times, September 2, 2000, "Organic produce attacked by food agency"

[3] The Irish Times, September 5, 2000, "Public 'entitled' to organic food option"

[4]http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_798000/798762.stm

[5] For more on this see: http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/fsa.htm

[6] Conference report at:  http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/watchingdrpusztai.htm

[7] http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/scisale.htm