Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-04-Speech-3-020"
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"en.20001004.3.3-020"2
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"Mr President, today we are to discuss, and perhaps vote on, a total of three reports which deal with this subject, two of them mine. They constitute the first steps on the long, long road towards ensuring food safety for all 370 million inhabitants of Europe. We might well hope that, before the whole of this package is in place, there will be very many more of us, as citizens, who are affected by these rules. This is the first step, and it is now also a question of establishing incredibly important principles before the work as a whole begins.
The first of my reports concerns foreign substances in animal nutrition. The most important changes which the Commission has proposed and which I support are to the effect that the directive should include absolutely every imaginable product intended for animal nutrition, including products used to feed what I call small animals, that is to say cats, dogs, guinea pigs etc.. The rules are designed to apply in the first place, however, to feedingstuffs for those animals we eat ourselves. After what has happened in the European market, it ought to be crystal-clear to us all now that, as human beings, we get to eat what we give to our animals.
The other important principle is the so-called dilution ban. This means that, if a batch of raw materials for foodstuffs has unduly high limit values, it should not be diluted down in undamaged batches in order in that way to escape the limit values. The Commission’s proposal removes those rules which entitle local and national authorities to local derogations. My report supports this.
We know that the foreign substances in question are very rarely acutely poisonous substances, but are long-term and long-lived substances which can build up, such as dioxin and aflotoxin and heavy metals such as cadmium, lead and mercury. We know that the levels of these substances are constantly increasing in our food chain. The percentages are increasing slowly and continually in the earth, in feedingstuffs and in food. It is therefore important that we start the preventive process by removing a portion of these products from the chain. The percentages must not constantly increase in the body throughout life. We know, for example, that, in the long term, cadmium obstructs the kidneys in both animals and human beings. We know that dioxin and aflotoxin are carcinogenic etc.
I totally agree with all the proposals tabled by the Commission on this issue. Moreover – and this is important because it is to come up at the vote – the Commission wants to introduce something called an intervention level. For all these substances, there is, as it were, a natural background level of constant ‘white noise’. We shall never escape this altogether. We have therefore set a limit value which may not be exceeded. The intervention level is a level at which vigilance is to be exercised and provides an opportunity to launch an investigation when it is discovered that a substance in a product or in a geographical area is increasing above the background level but still remains below the level at which it must be banned, that is to say the limit at which we
intervene. This is a crucial and important point in preventive work. In the long term, it is very important that we should be able to begin an investigation in peace and quiet and try to stop the increase in a particular substance before it reaches this emergency limit value. This is something which everyone at each stage in the food chain should in fact help with. If we let the matter rest until the limit value has been reached, the measures to be taken become very drastic. It is then a case of catastrophe intervention of the ‘dioxin in Belgium’ type. It is important for us to apply the precautionary principle in such a way that we can cope successfully with increases in foreign substances.
In both of these re-worked draft directives, I have tried to use a form of language which is readable. A legal text should be precise enough for it to be possible to comply with it. I also believe, however, that it is Parliament’s responsibility to try to produce laws, rules and regulations in the European Union which can be understood by our fellow citizens who have to comply with them and who need to read them. I have therefore made a lot of the language more straightforward and tried to simplify matters and make them crystal-clear.
When it comes to limit values, which must be set extremely rigorously in the future to check unwelcome developments, I would ask you to take account of the problems which low limit values, for example for dioxin, will mean for, for example, fishing communities in the Baltic, in parts of the North Sea and probably in Mediterranean coastal areas. I would also ask you to take account of farmers whose fields border either very busy roads or industries which have contaminated large areas. Many of these instances of poisoning or cases in which heavy metals were dispersed occurred before there was sufficient environmental awareness and before it was known what the effects would be. We cannot find the culprits. I would ask that we take account of these individual fishermen and farmers in future because they are innocent and are being hit by financial ruin.
When it comes to the directive on the official control of the field of animal nutrition, it is important that we really do have a form of inspection which is implemented and which is the same throughout the European Union. If inspection is not complied with and we are not in a position to inspect the inspectors, then all the thinking being done in connection with the safety of our fellow citizens will be undermined. The people of Europe cannot, however, properly rely upon such control’s really being carried out if there are major differences of approach between Member States and regions.
The second thing we must take into consideration is the fact that differences in the application of these inspection rules will mean serious disruption of the internal market. There will be a price to pay for safe food at every stage in the chain. It would therefore be dangerous if certain countries, areas or industries were to be able to escape inspection and compete over prices at the expense of safety. That would be an extremely undesirable situation."@en1
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