Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-06-12-Speech-2-037"
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"en.20010612.3.2-037"2
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"Mr President, the plan to create a European Food Authority was a direct result of the very serious deficiencies which became apparent in the Commission’s treatment of the issue of mad cow disease. It was the White Paper on food safety which proposed the creation of the authority which we are discussing here today. Mr Whitehead’s report has the merit of pointing out a certain number of ambiguities contained in the draft regulation, but it does not propose how those ambiguities should be removed. The rapporteur, quite rightly, emphasises the need to draw a very precise distinction between the advisory role of the European authority and the risk-management role which falls to the Member States and the Commission. The rapid alert system should not, therefore, be placed under the control of the authority. Why, then, has the word ‘agency’ been replaced by ‘authority’, which causes confusion and appears to signify that this body plays an executive role, which should not be the case?
The report also emphasises, rightly, the need for networking between the European authority and the agencies of the Member States, but it remains silent on the subject of how this close cooperation is to be achieved. The consultative forum ought, in principle, to be the means of achieving this cooperation, but how will it work? No specific explanation has been given on this crucial point. We have a remarkable level of scientific competence on food safety available at national level, for example the British FSA or the French FSA. At all costs we must avoid creating a European structure which competes with these national bodies or is redundant in relation to them. The national bodies must continue to supply their input on the assessment side, since this is what will enable the European agency to play its coordinating role, since the European agency has certainly not been given any authority which is superior to those of the national agencies.
Finally, with regard to the need to work actively to achieve the proposed consistency between the raised European standards and existing international standards, a problem which this report mentions almost as an aside, I also regret the fact that Parliament has not really discussed this vital point in any more detail so as to ensure that our initiatives do not have the effect of penalising European producers."@en1
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