Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-06-Speech-4-163"
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To give a brief description of the current situation in the Union as a whole, no restrictions have been imposed in the Union as a result of foot-and-mouth disease, except in Great Britain, and that was on 25 June this year, thirty days after the slaughter and destruction of the last vaccinated animal in the Netherlands. So in fourteen of the fifteen Member States of the Union, plus Northern Ireland, we have quite a favourable situation, which is the result of the implementation and effective application of measures to combat foot-and-mouth disease at Community level. I shall now run the risk of offending Mrs Lucas by referring briefly to the international point of view, and from that point of view we sincerely hope that the measures which have been adopted by France, Ireland and the Netherlands will enable them to obtain the necessary status from the International Office of Epizootics, thus enabling third countries to lift the trade restrictions that are still in place.
Finally, we at the Commission hope that we shall be able to learn some lessons for future use, with regard to the handling of this sort of crisis, so that we can improve our current regulatory and legislative system, for example by making provision for a certain number of additional requirements for intra-Community trade in small ruminants, such as restricting the number of stopping points, which would probably be the first step. We are also working on a proposal regarding the identification and registration of sheep and goats, and on another proposal regarding the importing of animal products by travellers. We are also working towards adjusting our inspection procedures when this type of epizootic appears. I believe that we now have sufficient experience, but we must not delude ourselves. The reinforcement of our legislation and of our systems, however necessary it may be, will not, on its own, be enough to prevent the reappearance of such an epidemic. We must also improve the operation of the veterinary services within Member States, and there is not doubt that we must also change our farming practices.
My last point is one that several Members have drawn attention to during our discussions, and that is the question of vaccination. As far as the use of so-called ‘ring’ vaccination around infected holdings is concerned, I should like to remind those of you who have sought to implicate the Commission by asking why the Commission did not order compulsory vaccination as a matter of urgency, that in our present legal system, which whatever any one says is characterised by certain forms of subsidiarity, vaccination is the responsibility of the national authorities. There is therefore a procedure which allows any Member State that wants to to use vaccination, and that is how it is done. The system exists and it is at the disposal of the Member States, but it is not the Commission’s responsibility. I believe that I have thus given a clear answer to the questions raised by Mr van Dam, Mr Martinez, Mr Mulder and Mrs Lucas.
However – and on this point I should like to reassure Mrs Lucas – since this is perhaps not the most important aspect, let us come back to the case of the United Kingdom, which is actually still giving cause for concern, since the two-thousandth case occurred on 3 September. Although the situation in Great Britain has remained stable for almost three months, we are still worried about it because of the fact that cases are continuing to occur within or close to the areas that have been placed under restrictions. Many Members have referred to the most recent cases, in the county of Northumberland, the place where the epidemic first appeared. These cases are worrying, because they were confirmed three months after the disease had disappeared there. Radical measures were taken: infected herds were slaughtered, as were neighbouring herds and contact herds, and although the occurrence of this admittedly limited but nonetheless worrying number of cases was to be expected, after the disease peaked at the beginning of April, the period over which a small number of cases have continued to occur is excessively long, and the Community has asked the British authorities to step up their eradication measures. Time is pressing, because things will become more difficult in autumn and winter, not only because of weather conditions, but also because it is customary for animals to be moved during that period.
The present development of the disease is clearly passing through a critical phase. This is not the time to relax our controls. As has already been said, and as several of you have emphasised, this is the time of year when we see herds being moved around and handled in various ways, and in our opinion it is therefore necessary to reduce animal movements to the absolute minimum. The Commission has made this known to the people involved.
Staying with the United Kingdom, the complex structure of beef and dairy farming, the absence of any clinical signs in sheep, and the fact that the spread of the disease within a herd or flock is slow, are all factors which complicate the problems and which make it necessary for us to have recourse to laboratory testing, and the capacity available for such testing is now sufficient.
So what is the Commission’s opinion? We would not say that the situation is satisfactory, because in this specific case it is not, but the risk of the disease spreading to other Member States is now much less than it was in March and April, when the disease was at its peak, because all the restrictions that were imposed, in particular on the movement of animals and untreated products from Great Britain, are still in place. We are carrying out regular on-the-spot inspections, the latest of which goes back to the end of August, in order to satisfy ourselves that the British authorities are taking adequate measures.
Other regions of Great Britain, in some cases quite large regions, have not been affected by the disease, and the Veterinary Committee must continue to consider the matter so that when the time comes, and circumstances make it possible, trade with those regions can be envisaged subject to stringent conditions. On this point we shall be extremely careful, because the experience of Northumberland reminds us that the risk is still present, even in those areas where it seemed that the disease had been brought under control.
To come back for a moment to the question of third countries, if Mrs Lucas will allow me, a certain number of countries have continued to take discriminatory measures against European products, which go beyond the international standards currently in force, and we are working on this matter together with a certain number of our trading partners. Many third countries have gradually lifted the somewhat extensive prohibitions that they had initially imposed. Others, by contrast, such as the United States, Canada and even some of the countries which have applied for accession, have been slow to lift the restrictions, which they still maintain, wrongly, even today. We shall continue to work on this question, taking as our basis the WTO Agreement on Health and Plant Health.
Speaking more generally, it should be emphasised, first of all, that this crisis has had major repercussions on the Community budget. We decided to grant an overall budget of EUR 400 million to the four Member States affected this year, and the latest forecasts show that the Union’s anticipated financial contribution will be slightly more than EUR 1.5 billion. We shall take the necessary measures from the point of view of budgetary procedure. There is no doubt that this is an exceptional situation. We do not know how to predict the budget for epizootics on this scale, and we shall therefore have to make adjustments as we go along. That is just one aspect of this issue.
A second aspect, of course, is the damage done to the image of our livestock farming industry, following the slaughter of almost four million animals. A third aspect is the fact that the problem, as has already been mentioned, is also present outside the European Union, and we are seriously worried following the recent appearance of a case in Turkish Thrace."@en1
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