Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-12-Speech-2-318"
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you all for excellent teamwork for the almost a year and a half during which I have been dealing with these two reports. It has gone incredibly well. In the common position, the Council and the Commission have accepted the majority of the just under a hundred amendments we submitted on the first reading. I am very pleased to see that the Council and the Commission are now in agreement with the European Parliament on the fundamental principles.
Amendment No 12 on the permanent marking of imported pet food is particularly controversial for the United States. Regarding dyeing the raw materials which are to be included under categories 1 and 2, it is laid down that products in categories 1 and 2 are to be marked once they have turned into fat and processed proteins. Such processed material must then be permanently marked when it comes to imported pet feed, as exactly the same requirements must be set for imported products as for our own products.
Amendment 15 concerns the separation of facilities. Right from the start, the European Parliament demanded completely separate sites. I can accept separate buildings if they really are separate – and not just separate parts of one building under the same roof.
There are also a number of amendments which were rejected by the committee and which, for various reasons, should be rejected once more. We are concerned here with deleting references to biogas and composting. This regulation does not regulate biogas plants and composting systems. On the contrary, Article 6.2 says that national legislation in this area should apply until new EU environmental legislation is passed. The only point of the reference in Article 1.2 is to give the Commission legal justification for requesting scientific statements on biogas and composting.
If we delete household waste, that is, from private kitchens, from the definition of catering waste, we are doing ourselves a disservice. We know that catering waste is a very serious channel of infection for both swine fever and foot and mouth disease. I personally think it is quite difficult to ban household waste being used as feed. It has been a tradition in our European culture for thousands of years but we are now living in a new world and in another time, in which food, feed and ingredients are moved from place to place in a completely different way from 50 years ago, for example, when feed and food circulated in relatively small and recognisable cycles.
Once more I would like to thank my colleagues, the shadow rapporteurs, the Commission and the Council for excellent teamwork over the past year and a half.
The first and most important principle is that only by-products from animals approved for human consumption may be used in feed, cosmetics and medicinal products. I say this with a slight reference to the preceding debate. We will thus obtain a ban on intra-species recycling, that is, animal cannibalism. The new regulation will in fact be sufficiently flexible to be adapted to technological developments and new scientific findings. The common position has in fact been welcomed by the industry concerned in Europe.
Please consider that the final vote tomorrow puts 200 000 jobs across Europe at risk. Do not forget that this industry is not located in densely populated areas. Instead, we are looking at companies in rural areas. Every day that passes without clear ground rules, more and more small and medium-sized companies are in danger of being forced to shut down. To be blunt, I could say that Europe’s producers, and consumers too, are standing and stamping their feet while we here, at the very last stages, are engaging in trivial disputes.
Let me first talk about Amendment No 25, which is a compromise. As is always the case with compromises, this means that no one has got exactly what they want. We have all had to give in quite a bit, and I am a little uncertain as to what the end result of this compromise will be. However, the amendment does give the Member States which currently permit the use of catering waste under extremely carefully controlled conditions a transitional period of four years.
Towards the end of the debate on the matter, a number of details concerning sludge and waste water came up. Amendments Nos 2, 4 and 14 should in fact be set aside in favour of Amendment No 21, which is intended to promote the safe handling of these materials so as to avoid serious environmental consequences. This is therefore a practical way of dealing with this issue.
I myself would really like to see Amendments Nos 3 and 5 put into effect. Unfortunately, this is more or less impossible for technical reasons. These amendments concern the marking of category 1 material. The already adopted Regulation on TSEs contains clear requirements that direct risk material be marked. Amendment No 5 is about the marking of category 2 material. I think this would be desirable, but that the amendment should be rejected because it would have unreasonable consequences. If the amendment were to be adopted, all fertiliser – natural fertiliser – within the EU would have to be marked, and this would affect approximately 1 200 000 000 tonnes a year. This means that we would be able to choose whether the fields were to be blue, green or purple each spring, and it would all look a bit peculiar.
Amendments Nos 6 and 16 must in actual fact be adopted. Otherwise, the report’s main principle that only raw materials which have been approved for human consumption may be used in animal feed would be undermined. The amendments do not in fact involve any changes to the requirements which currently apply to sampling and/or
inspections of slaughtered animals. It is only the final assessment based on existing rules which is affected by this regulation.
Amendments Nos 7 and 8 concern the handling of catering waste. In this case, I recommend voting in favour of Amendments Nos 22 and 23 whereby catering waste generated from means of transport operating internationally should, with all its risks, be treated in accordance with the most stringent requirements of the regulation, in category 1. On the other hand, catering waste in category 3 should be handled under existing structures and systems for collection, transport and disposal in line with the EU’s waste directive.
The common position contains a somewhat strange proposal regarding endangered species of necrophagous birds, namely lammergeiers in Spain. Amendment No 24 states that it is permitted to use category 1 material to feed this specific small group of birds. I have checked this very carefully. These birds have to have this special food. It sounds a little odd, but sometimes nature is, by nature, odd."@en1
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