Brussels, 28 May 2025

The European Commission’s Vision for Agriculture and Food recognises the essential role of the agrifood sector for the EU’s competitiveness. This critical sector employs over 30 million people and substantially contributes to the EU’s economy (EUR 900 billion in 2022)(1). Nevertheless, business and food and feed industry operators face significant regulatory challenges in the EU which put them at a competitive disadvantage to other regions.

The undersigned organisations represent thousands of food and feed business operators along the agri-food chain; including food and feed primary, secondary producers, and ingredients suppliers that are directly and indirectly subject to the scientific outputs, guidance documents and opinions of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). We support the Commission’s ambition of regulatory simplification and streamlining. This is essential to accelerate access to innovation and reinforce the EU’s global competitiveness. We consider the ongoing EFSA’s Performance Evaluation2 as a unique opportunity to make the Commission ambitions a reality.

Ensuring the safety of the agri-food products is a priority for our industries. It is also a core principle of Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 (General Food Law), which established EFSA as an independent agency to provide scientific advice and support, thereby ensuring a high level of consumer protection. The outputs of EFSA are of great importance to our industries, and we value the work performed by EFSA. In recent years, we have noted several promising developments, particularly in relation to stakeholder engagement and development of EFSA's Catalogue of support initiatives.

While we acknowledge certain improvements, we are concerned about ongoing challenges with EFSA’s performance and timeliness which increasingly discourages many businesses from entering the EU market. Efficient and operational risk assessment processes are crucial to support the uptake of innovation and the acceleration to more resilient and sustainable food and feed production.

This open letter underlines the main horizontal challenges faced by industry stakeholders at the risk assessment level and proposes solutions for more efficient and science-based processes. Ensuring the continued development of innovative agri-food products necessitating a safety assessment for authorisation within the EU requires urgent action. We therefore call on the Commission and EFSA to speed up the delivery of EFSA’s performance evaluation and to give full consideration to the challenges highlighted in this letter.

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(1) Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: A Vision for Agriculture and Food; Shaping together an attractive farming and agri-food sector for future generations (link)