Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-14-Speech-2-061"
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"en.20000314.4.2-061"2
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"Mr President, for centuries, cows have eaten grass and chocolate has been made from cocoa. Then, a few years ago, Great Britain, which gave the world meat served with jam, hooligans and Adam Smith, started to feed cows on cadavers and to manufacture chocolate without cocoa. These aberrations should have remained confined to the British Isles, but doing away with borders within Europe has allowed adulterated chocolate to move freely, to the extent that today, in seven out of our fifteen countries, without being aware of it, consumers are swallowing chocolate that has been tampered with, and that includes Mr Haider’s Austria which, in that respect, has something in common with Mr Guterres’ Portugal. In order to reassure us, we are told that the imitation cocoa is restricted to six tropical products: illipe from Borneo, butter from shea nuts – which are also used to manufacture aircraft engine oil – etc. As we go from directives to amendments, however, these six products become seven, eight, nine, up to and including soya, oilseed rape and GMOs.
We are also told that the cocoa fraud will be limited to 5% to begin with, then to 10%, not to mention that no check will ever be carried out, in the same way that, for example, the boxes of Chiquita bananas are not checked, which are supposed to weigh eighteen kilograms and in fact weigh twenty. The checks are pointless in any case, as we are told that the margin of error is 1%, whereas scientists tell us that it is in fact 40%. We are told above all to ‘eat and drink without fear, you are protected by the label’. Yet the label is a deception in graphic terms because it is illegible and a hypocrisy in scientific terms because the mention of ‘palm oil’, for example, is drowned among the list of ingredients. Just as in the case of port we are not told ‘South African counterfeit’, for cocoa we are not told ‘counterfeit’.
Then, lacking arguments to justify the chocolate fraud, the multinationals say, ‘You must accept 5%, or there will be wholesale fraud.’ What then? All you have to do is call the product ‘shea-late’ if it is made from shea nuts, or ‘soya-late’ if it is made from soya, but not ‘chocolate’. The 388 000 tonnes of French chocolate, for example, must be made from cocoa, and the French turnover of FRF 19 billion, for example, must be earned honestly by small specialists.
It is a legal obligation with regard to the Ivory Coast and African farmers. We are linked by the Lomé convention and by the convention on commodities which the European Union has signed, with reference to cocoa. It is also a financial obligation. If we do not fulfil it, then we shall be forced to compensate for the losses in these countries under the Stabex system. It is an obligation in terms of health and food safety, since the substitutes for cocoa, such as Brazil nuts, may cause immunological reactions.
Finally, it is a question of honesty, of morality. Let us put an end to this widespread dishonesty, where you begin with a product incorrectly described as chocolate and you end with a Commission incorrectly described as European, whose members are Americanically-modified organisms and whose standard is a flag of convenience concealing a globalist cargo."@en1
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