Is being transparent enough to be trusted? Communication limits and alternatives to develop trust in food safety organizations

Pesticides residues are major concerns for European consumers. Indeed, when consulted about trust and credibility in pesticide risk evaluation process, people present very little confidence in the relevant food safety... [ view full abstract ]

Pesticides residues are major concerns for European consumers. Indeed, when consulted about trust and credibility in pesticide risk evaluation process, people present very little confidence in the relevant food safety authorities. For instance, 54% of French people distrust them and only 13% believe that they are told the truth on this issue (IRSN, 2014). Similarly, 74% of the Germans believe that governments are under lobbies’ influences when assessing pesticides risks (BfR, 2010). Thus, major European food safety organizations implemented new communication strategies centered on transparency in order to restore “trust” with the public.

It appears that despite efforts to improve risk communication and the risk evaluation process’ transparency, these institutions face a lasting distrust. Numerous civil society organizations – watchdogs or environmental ones – still perceive risk evaluation policies to be the results of lobbies’ influences and publicly criticize food safety organizations’ opacities. This widespread defiance in food safety authorities peaked in a recent polemic when the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the German Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung (BfR) challenged the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decision to classify the herbicide glyphosate as “potentially carcinogenic”. This decision triggered a strong reaction among European public opinions who did not understand the rationale of these conflicting assessments however “transparently” communicated.

In the present research, our objective is to understand and explain the failure of “transparency” based risk communication and risk management strategies conducted by three institutions in charge of Food Safety, two national ones (ANSES-France and BfR-Germany) and one European (EFSA). Between 2012 and 2015, using critical discourse analysis and media content analysis, we analyzed more than 250 documents from press releases, scientific articles, position papers, reports and news items. We compared long-term risk communication practices on different platforms (press, website and social media), responses strategies in crisis and stakeholders’ reactions.

Our results show that the different communication choices made to improve the transparency and relationship with the civil society stakeholders of these institutions play decisive roles to mitigate public relation crisis. Moreover, we demonstrate that transparency based policies and communication practices are not the sole answer to citizen and stakeholders’ demands. Understanding and decrypting competing acceptations of transparency, frankness and governance are crucial to understand and prevent crisis. The implications of these findings for organizations and decision makers as well as for future research will be discussed.