Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-06-14-Speech-4-201"
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"en.20010614.12.4-201"2
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"Mr President, this is a comprehensive report and I congratulate Mrs Redondo for the great deal of work that she has put into it. The House might be interested to know that Mrs Redondo very kindly accepted my invitation to come to London during the formulation of this report to take evidence from representatives of the UK pig industry and senior officials from the National Farmers Union and the Ministry of Agriculture. We happened to be in one of those meetings on Tuesday 20 February this year, the very day the first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK was reported. As you can well imagine, this brought our meeting to an abrupt halt.
Indeed, it is partly because of foot-and-mouth disease that I wish to direct my remarks to the question of feeding catering waste or pigswill to pigs. I know that my colleagues from Germany and Austria have serious reservations about the proposal to ban such material from being fed to pigs throughout the EU. As Mrs Redondo has just said, Amendment No 33 seeks to permit controlled swill feeding, subject to stringent exceptional arrangements, if it can be guaranteed that the pathogens which cause epizootic diseases have been destroyed by treatment. Amendment No 37 seeks to achieve a similar objective.
I would ask the House to reject both these amendments this evening. In the UK we had stringent controls of swill feeding in place. We ensured that pig farmers only used the most appropriate and up-to-date equipment for boiling catering waste to the correct temperature to destroy all pathogens and we ensured that regular inspections of the farms using such equipment were carried out. Of course you cannot legislate for human behaviour, however. It now seems almost certain that infected catering waste was delivered to a farm in the north-east of England, which for whatever reason, was not properly treated, or perhaps was not treated at all. This simple error, whether deliberate or just a mistake, has led to the destruction of over six million animals in the United Kingdom and tens of thousands of animals in Ireland, the Netherlands and France. We have now banned swill in the UK entirely. I urge the House to do the same across the whole of the EU."@en1
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