Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-11-12-Speech-1-140"
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"en.20011112.11.1-140"2
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"Mr President, Ireland is committed to working with all Member States and international bodies to achieve higher standards in animal welfare. Due to our peripheral location and our island status, as Mr Maat has recognised – for which I thank him – we have no realistic alternative to exporting our live cattle by boat, and we need to find export markets for nine out of the ten animals produced on our farms.
While I fully support the general principle of slaughtering animals as close as possible to the point of production, the reality is that many of the export markets available to us demand live animals rather than the processed products and for the foreseeable future the proper functioning of our market will require a balance between the dead meat and the live meat trade.
Regulation 615/98 links all payments of export refunds to compliance with strict animal welfare standards during transport, including full clinical examination of every animal. We must police and enforce this fully. The live export incident involving Germany and the Lebanon this summer resulted from the inexperience of the German authorities, as they are infrequent exporters of live animals and had no prior veterinary agreement with the Lebanese. Hard cases make bad law. I do not agree with the German agricultural minister's view that export refunds on live cattle can now no longer be justified. If Europe does not fulfil the requirements of third countries, they will get their supplies from far further afield, with little or no controls and regulation from an animal welfare point of view since there are still no internationally agreed standards on transport.
We have to have the highest possible standards not just in the interest of the animals but also of the producers, who will get a far better price for healthy unstressed animals. It is true that we must continue to review our standards of protection of animals during transport and each Member State must be willing to police and enforce the law. However, with over a million tonnes of surplus beef in the EU, export refunds will be required for some time to come and I will not be supporting any proposal to remove them."@en1
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