Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-04-13-Speech-4-298"
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"en.20000413.12.4-298"2
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"Mr President, Mr Maat’s report quite properly defends the right of millions of European children to receive subsidised milk in school. The Commission is proposing to reduce the level of Community aid, by amending the regulation on the common organisation of the market in milk and milk products. The choice of cofinancing involves the risk that certain Member States might be reticent about supporting the project, mainly because of financial constraints, and the effect would be to reduce the amount of the available budgetary appropriation and thus establish discrimination between European schoolchildren.
Milk distribution in schools contributes to the maintenance of consumption of milk products, and those same milk products are vital to healthy nutrition for children, so that they can grow up healthy. Subsidising milk means teaching children balanced eating habits at an age when lifelong eating patterns and tastes are being formed. That role finds particular resonance in this age of eating disorders and unhealthy diets. For example, the increase in the number of obese children in Europe as a result of the culture of sweet, highly coloured fizzy drinks is alarming.
Must we remind people that milk provides a crucial part of our protein, calcium, vitamin and mineral requirements? It strengthens the capacity of young children who drink it to protect themselves against diseases caused by nutritional anarchy. Mr Maat rightly mentions the way eating patterns change with our changing lifestyle. Increasingly young people go off to school without eating any breakfast or without having any milk in their morning meal. Nor do we forget that some children from very deprived backgrounds skip breakfast for financial reasons. These children are exposed to dietary deficiencies and have difficulty concentrating at school.
The Commission is washing its hands of all this, while heading up lots of other programmes that cost a great deal more. Why undermine the very one which affects the health of European children? At a time of upheaval in the role of our schools as a training workshop for life, the distribution of subsidised milk …"@en1
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