A fuzzy multi-criteria approach for the ex-ante impact assessment of food safety policies

There are many obstacles hindering regulatory impact assessment (RIA) for food safety policies, mainly difficulties in the monetisation of impacts and major uncertainties in assessing some of the policy outcomes. This paper reviews these obstacles and explores how a procedure based on fuzzy methods could address them. The resulting tool (named ‘Scryer’) consists in the combination of an explicit scoring system with indicators of uncertainty in assessments, and the application of fuzzy logic to multi-criteria analysis. Among the desirable properties of Scryer there are the ability of aggregating a variety of different impacts without necessarily monetise them, and the flexibility to adjust to qualitative and model-based impact assessment. An illustrative application on regulating mycotoxin contents in cereals and cereal products is provided.