Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-06-14-Speech-4-204"
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"en.20010614.12.4-204"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, a lot of attention is being paid to pigs this week. Unfortunately the discussion of the Redondo Jiménez report is ending in an anticlimax. On Monday the Swedish Minister spoke on animal welfare, including tightening welfare regulations for animal transport. This morning we voted on the Busk report, in which we are trying to improve the living conditions of pigs in great detail. We now have a report before us in which we are supposed to simply agree to the destruction of thousands of healthy pigs if there is an outbreak of swine fever.
This Parliament speaks with two voices! One for the consumer and his feeling for animal welfare and one for the economy and trade, which must not be allowed to suffer from the outbreak of a disease. I have requested a roll-call vote on this report and on Mr Mulder’s amendment, so that the public can see from Members’ voting behaviour the double tongue of this Parliament on animal welfare.
It is astonishing that Mrs Redondo Jiménez has learned nothing from the combating of foot-and-mouth disease as it has developed in recent months, particularly in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. As part of the preparation of this report I should have like to see Mrs Redondo driving around the Oene region, the foot-and-mouth triangle in the Netherlands. It would have struck her that almost every field carries a poster reading: ‘EU, vaccinate now!’ I have argued more than once in this Parliament that animals are more than production units. They are creatures made by God, for whom we have responsibility. Norms and values apply not only in church but in the sty too.
Until 1980, vaccination was commonplace in the European Union. In order to meet the trade, the non-vaccination policy was implemented. In the 1997 outbreak of swine fever in the Netherlands, thousands of healthy pigs had to be destroyed and then too there was a call for vaccination. When will this Parliament start listening to its citizens? There is a vaccine available that makes it possible to distinguish vaccination from infection. There are still some drawbacks associated with those vaccines, but are there none associated with the mass destruction of animals? No one less than the International Bureau for Infectious Livestock Diseases (
) recommends that in serious outbreaks of swine fever, countries that previously did not vaccinate should consider emergency use of a marker vaccine.
Infectious animal diseases, like swine fever, show the weaknesses of current agricultural policy. It is wrong that organic farming and extensive animal husbandry should be proposed as
solution. These forms of agriculture are not less susceptible to livestock disease, on the contrary. Because of the high level of enclosure in intensive livestock farming, these businesses are precisely less susceptible to infection. That is not to say that organic farming does not have desirable aspects – its small-scale nature has many advantages. A combination of the small-scale structure of organic farming and the enclosure of intensive livestock keeping is a key for the future. For production we must abandon large-scale mobility and switch to more enclosed operations, no longer with international, but with regional circuits."@en1
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"Office international des épizooties"1
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