Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-05-Speech-2-280"
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"en.20020205.13.2-280"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start by congratulating Mr Olsson on his work and also on the willingness he has shown in incorporating the suggestions he received from all Members of Parliament into his report.
The report’s explanatory statement gives a perfect account of the BSE crisis from its origins in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
The 180 000 infected bovine animals in Great Britain, in addition to the 1 325 in the rest of Europe by the year 2000 and the 101 human cases of new variant CJD have raised serious issues about animal feed and have highlighted the far from harmless effect of this feed on the food chain.
Today, fortunately, we can congratulate ourselves on the scientific advances made in discovering the cause of the disease and on the efforts being made by the Commission and the Member States to eradicate it once and for all. However, there are still some loose ends that need to be tied up in order to complete these investigations and implement the measures that are strictly necessary, because the measures that have been implemented are extremely costly to public and private funds, and for this reason, we must not ask for anything that is unnecessary, even though it costs nothing to ask.
Consequently, I wish to put forward the idea that, until there is scientific evidence to support it, we should neither gratuitously request that the age for obligatory BSE testing be lowered, nor should we ask for the list of risk material to be extended. It would be a different issue altogether were veterinary scientists to recommend this, but, as things stand, they have not done so.
With regard to conclusion No 27, which calls for a reform of the CAP to tackle this problem, I would say that the CAP deals with a great deal more than food safety alone and that this safety is sufficiently complex to be addressed within the reform of the CAP. This is well understood by the Commission and hence the White Paper on Food Safety, the European Food Authority and all the legislation on food safety and animal feed that we are revising in this legislative period.
This is the framework in which the technical and regulatory actions to be taken to guarantee food safety in the whole food production chain and not in the CAP are established, although one side-effect of it could be to impact on some aspects of the CAP.
Finally, as has been said on many occasions, we think that if the crisis was not tackled earlier, it was not due to a lack of research, studies or mandatory regulations. It was due to a failure to implement standards and to a breakdown in the appropriate controls for their implementation. These are areas in which we should have more influence in the future."@en1
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