Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-15-Speech-3-201"
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"en.20001115.9.3-201"2
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"Madam President, I would like to make three points. Firstly, to respond to the justified and very demanding need of European consumers for food safety, we are going to place the bar of controls and precautions at an extremely high level. But if we introduce generalised screening tests, if we destroy MBMs, if we impose the slaughter of an entire herd for just one sick animal, we must demand strictly equivalent health standards from the third countries who are our commercial partners and who seek to export live animals, carcasses and meat products to the Community.
Secondly, even before this crisis, the Community suffered a serious deficit in vegetable proteins, since we accepted, at Blair House, an incredible limitation on our oil-seed production to 30% of our requirements, just to please the United States and its soya exporters. Now, the Community cannot cultivate more than 5.5 million hectares of oil seeds, nor does it have the right to do so, even though our needs are in the order of 18 million hectares. That is why food manufacturers have had to make extensive use of MBMs in their products. In the future, when these MBMs are banned, we are going to need millions of additional hectares of oil seed crops.
This crisis underscores the absurd nature of the concessions made by the European Union within the framework of the GATT. We denounced this here in Parliament, when Jimmy Goldsmith was here. We have the land, the climate and the necessary knowledge to immediately replace MBMs with non-genetically modified vegetable protein, but instead, while financing set-aside, we have given up the right to grow, on our own land, the vegetable proteins we urgently need to feed our animals and our people.
That is why our group has tabled an amendment calling on the Council and the Commission to find ways of re-launching, in Europe, the farming of vegetable proteins to replace, to great advantage, prion-ridden MBMs and transgenic American soya. We also ask that the disastrous Blair House Agreement, which binds our oil seed producers hand and foot, should be renegotiated within the framework of the COM.
Finally, it is the duty of the Community to come to the assistance of all the beef sector operators who are the victims of the profound destabilisation of their markets in order to help them fund the costs of obligatory testing and the destruction of animal residues which have been withdrawn from the food chain, as well as the costs of vital promotion measures. Otherwise, there will no longer be any point in talking about a common agricultural policy."@en1
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