Legislating for Risk and Precaution: Bridging the Divide between Science and Law for Biosecurity

Robert Black, MA, LLM, PhD, FHEA

After forty five years as an academic and public servant (UK, Belize) Rob retired from the post of Associate Professor of Agricultural and Environmental Regulation at the Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, UK, having formerly been Reader in Law at the university’s law school. His career started in mycology, bacteriology and plant health involving several years residence overseas and then frequent advisory visits to the Caribbean, mainland Africa and Indian Ocean, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to help develop plant health services. His membership of professional societies includes the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel, Statute Law Society, International Association of Legislation and British Society for Plant Pathology.

His regulatory experience in plant health and pesticides prompted him to take legal qualifications just at the start of the WTO era, by which time his government clients had also been asking him to advise on legislation in these sectors. Consequently, providing formal legal advice on sanitary and phytosanitary measures/biosecurity began to be combined with technical aspects of academic work and consultancy and eventually became the dominant theme in his profile, with legislative review and drafting of primary and secondary legislation in those continents or regions, commissioned by many international development partners including UK’s ODA, EU, FAO and the Asian Development Bank. Rob continued to consult in this way for the Asian Development Bank in Central Asia after academic retirement.

He was also Senior Editor of the online plant pathology journal New Disease Reports 2007–16 and continues as Bacteriology Editor for this journal.

Rob had the privilege of seeing Bob Marley perform live in Jamaica in the late seventies and by coincidence lives within 500 m of the former Rastafarian Centre in Kennington. At the CALC Europe conference in 2023, he was introduced as ‘Robert Plant’ for his paper on plant health legislation—an honour as RP is another of his rock heroes! He’s the uncle of TMBG’s lead guitarist Dan Miller.

John Moloney, BA

John is an Irish civil servant working in the Department for Agriculture, Food and the Marine and sometime Sir William Dale Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. He is an active associate member of the Commonwealth Association of Legislative Counsel.

John spent his early career working in the sea fisheries area with responsibility for regulatory matters and preparation of legislation, largely secondary legislation relating to sea fisheries. He then spent eight years working in the veterinary medicines area, being responsible for the preparation and management of a large volume of both criminal and civil litigation as well as preparing legislation in this area.

He was a part of the team responsible for the legislative input to the State’s response to Foot and Mouth disease in 2001, including as part of the team that brought emergency legislation from inception to enactment in little over a week (Diseases of Animals (Amendment) Act 2001). He then worked in the legal services area of the same department where he was responsible for a range of legislative documents. In recent years, he was part of the team that worked on what became the Animal Health and Welfare Act 2013 and spent some years working on the preparation of secondary legislation under that Act and in the wider implementation of this legislation.

John has experience preparing secondary legislation stretching back over thirty years and has made every possible mistake in that time.

Andrew Graffham, BSc (Hons), PhD

Andrew has thirty-four years’ experience working with government agencies and food business operators in thirty-nine countries in Africa, Asia, Caribbean, Europe and Pacific. He has a professional background in microbiology, food safety and risk assessment. He has worked extensively on SPS regulations and standards, food safety management and trade-related technical assistance. He is an expert in the WTO, EU, US, EAEU, Chinese and Japanese SPS regulatory frameworks and private standards. He has been an SPS technical adviser for DFID attending the sessions of the standard trade and development facility working group and Chairman of the GLOBALGAP Microbiological Risk Assessment (MRA) committee. His activities range from helping third-country suppliers and competent authorities to overcome SPS-related barriers to export markets, to working with food business operators to develop ways to manage food safety risks with minimal resources.