Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-07-22-Speech-4-017"
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"en.19990722.2.4-017"2
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"(NL) Mr President, as the people in my country already know, the dioxin crisis has, I am sorry to say, propelled tens of thousands of companies into extreme difficulties. It is my belief that when an economic and environmental disaster occurs on such a scale, people should have the courage to seek out and point to the causes, and, where appropriate, the culprits, not out of some misplaced form of vengeance, but in order to prevent problems of this kind from occurring in the future.
We must be honest. It is, above all, the former Belgian government that made one blunder too many in this area. At first, the government didn"t know what was going on and was completely indifferent, then it wanted to sweep everything under the carpet until after the elections, and ultimately it was responsible for a panic reaction which was out of all proportion and which led to the entire world boycotting so-called Belgian products, although it was my country, Flanders that suffered most from this, since the lion"s share of so-called ‘Belgian’ exports are, of course, Flemish exports.
But sadly enough, the problem is not just one of incompetence, nepotism in the administration, political appointments and lack of monitoring in Belgium alone. Perhaps we, as MEPs, must now just face the fact that years of European agricultural policy have, in fact, almost destroyed the high-quality agriculture that can invariably almost be described as small-scale, and have led to the omnipotence of industrial European agriculture and to the omnipotence of a number of agro-industrial groups which are only out to make a profit and which thumb their noses at public health and quality standards.
If, for example, the man in the street were to hear that all manner of waste was being recycled for animal feed, that years after mad cow disease, herbivores are still being fed with animal bonemeal and what is more, that products of obscure provenance which have undergone no checks whatsoever, are being mixed into animal feed bases, then he may well ask himself if decades of European agricultural policy should not, in all honesty, be classified as a total failure. I shall remind you again that half of the European budget is spent on this agricultural policy.
I believe we must now have the courage, and we must now ask the Council and the Commission to have the courage, firstly, to learn from past mistakes and to discontinue the kind of agricultural policy we have been pursuing to date, and to opt, at last, for high-quality agriculture in Europe, which is the sensible, sober and necessary choice."@en1
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"Vanhecke (TDI)"1
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