Survey finds widespread food worries

Four out of five people want changes to British farming

By BBC News Online's environment correspondent Alex Kirby

Almost nine British people out of 10 asked about their attitudes to food safety expressed concern ranging from slight to considerable.

Even more said they were worried about the present foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Three-quarters of those asked said ordinary people were not consulted enough about food safety. And four out of five wanted significant changes in farming practices.

The responses came from members of the public who completed questionnaires distributed in two parts of England - Norwich in Norfolk and Bude in Cornwall.

The researchers distributed 600 questionnaires, of which 473 were returned. The sampling was conducted between 2 and 5 April.

'Understanding risk'

Preliminary results were presented at the launch in London of the University of East Anglia's new five-year programme, Understanding Risk.

This will study risk and public perceptions of it in five areas: genetically-modified organisms and food safety; climate change; radioactive waste; information technology; and the human genome.

UEA's partners in the Centre for Environmental Risk (CER) are the Institute of Food Research, the University of Wales Cardiff, and Brunel University.

Professor Nick Pidgeon, programme director of the CER, said the broad patterns of response to the questionnaire were similar, although Norfolk has so far had no foot-and-mouth cases while Bude is about 20 miles from the major focus of the outbreak in Devon.

Among indicative findings, he singled out the fact that 89% of the full sample said they were "very concerned or slightly concerned about general food safety issues at present".

And 91% agreed or strongly agreed that "I am very concerned about foot-and-mouth disease".

But people in Bude expressed significantly more concern over the stress and anxiety suffered by rural communities, and also for the future of those communities.

'Low trust'

Asked how far they trusted each of 14 possible sources of information about foot-and-mouth, the respondents disclosed very low trust in Government ministers and in the European Union.

The Ministry of Agriculture won intermediate ratings, with the highest trust accorded to veterinary surgeons, then friends and family, and also farmers. The mass media were judged only a little more trustworthy than ministers and the EU.

Environmental groups, consumer organisations and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) were moderately trusted. But the researchers urge some caution here, because they found that 19% of the sample had not heard of the FSA, while, they say, "probably an even larger proportion have no clear idea of what FSA actually do".

Asked whether the public were sufficiently consulted about food safety issues, 75.7% agreed slightly or strongly that they were not.

And 81.8% expressed similar agreement with the statement: "Farming should change to more natural and humane methods of growing crops and rearing animals."

Public understanding

The researchers say: "The level of interest people showed in the survey and their willingness to participate runs counter to the received wisdom of a profound level of public apathy and a disinclination to participate in any form of 'civic society'.

"Our study is powerful evidence of a willingness and genuine enthusiasm to debate issues of risk understanding and risk policy."

Professor Pidgeon, whose theme was responding to the inquiry last year by Lord Phillips into BSE, said that as a society the UK needed to move beyond traditional public understanding of science efforts if it was to resolve some of the most contested risk issues.

"In particular", he said, "scientists must understand the public as much as the public need to understand science."