Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-25-Speech-3-026"
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"en.20001025.2.3-026"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Europe is afflicted by serious public health crises at regular intervals. These crises, such as BSE and dioxin, have become a real problem for society and lead to a loss of consumer confidence in the food they eat. The latest events have brought that home to us again.
The Member States have risen to the situation, like France, which has set up a national food safety agency. Today the European Commission is proposing the creation of a European Food Safety Agency, responsible for analysing all public health risks.
Sound scientific knowledge is certainly essential to help assess the risks linked to the food chain, from the farm to the table. Any initiative to help identify these risks is therefore a move in the right direction. But is that not approaching the problem the wrong way round? As it often does, the Commission is proposing regulatory measures to remedy or alleviate the adverse effects of a policy for which it is frequently jointly responsible, without in any way questioning its own basic approach. Thus, European requirements relating to traceability, which are good measures, have been made all the more necessary now that we have abandoned checks at our internal or Community borders. Similarly, the European Union is seeking to protect biodiversity and to safeguard ecosystems with its Directives on habitat and on birds, but without questioning the emphasis on high agricultural productivity, which, after all, we know to be the main cause, together with urbanisation, of imbalances in ecosystems.
In fact it is precisely this emphasis on high productivity that exacerbates food safety risks: the specialisation of farms, most of which practice intensive farming, the need to fall in line with American market prices, and therefore to seek the lowest costs wherever possible, especially for animal feed, the transportation of animals, frequently across great distances, and the various components of the food chain from the farm to the table are all risk factors for public health, yet we prefer to cure the disease rather than prevent it occurring. That is a serious state of affairs.
Nonetheless, under these circumstances, the European Food Safety Agency has an important part to play in conducting scientific risk analysis. But let us make sure we leave it to the Member States to manage these risks and to apply the precautionary principle in a reasonable and proportionate manner. That will be a guarantee of effectiveness. Indeed, who better than the Member States to carry out adequate local checks? Who better than the Member States to distinguish genuinely dangerous products from those deriving from our different food cultures, even when they pose no health risk at all? Anyway, there is no such thing as a zero risk, nor is it even desirable, given that completely aseptic conditions are no guarantee of food safety. Finally, who better than the Member States to inform the public of the risks linked to this or that product?
So let us entrust the European Food Safety Agency only with conducting scientific risk analysis, in liaison with our national agencies. Let us require excellence and independence of it. Let us ask it to make recommendations to the political authorities responsible for risk management. And let us not, therefore, give it responsibility for running the rapid alert system and for communication with the public.
Lastly, we must beware of standardising our food cultures. Each of our countries, and especially France, is proud of its gastronomic culture and local products. That is one of the areas of diversity that makes up the richness of Europe and its quality of life. Let us guard it jealously."@en1
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