Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-17-Speech-2-285"
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"en.20021217.9.2-285"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, I think this is a very wide ranging and difficult subject. I have listened very carefully to what you have said and I come now to a topic that I would have liked to have put before you earlier in writing. But I believe that a joint effort may perhaps still elicit an answer from you.
Nitrofurans is a generic term. One very important product it covers is Nifursol. Nifursol is the last histomonostat still to be permitted in the EU for use as an additive in poultry feed to prevent blackhead disease. I admit I am not a scientist. According to my information, however, experts say that this product was banned for good in Regulation 2377/90. The Scientific Committee for Animal Nutrition (SCAN) was asked by the Commission to make a risk assessment of Nifursol. Investigations that will give a definite answer have yet to be carried out.
Because I also have the feed additives report, I have now heard the alarm bells ringing, because many who are concerned with this matter fear there will be a treatment crisis in a few months’ time. As a logical consequence of the ban on nitrofurans in Regulation 2377/90, Regulation 1756/2002 was issued on 23 September 2002, banning Nifursol from 31 March 2003. When this ban comes into force on 31 March, there will, for example, be a crisis in the treatments used to combat blackhead disease in turkeys. No alternative remedy is available legally in the EU, either as a feed additive or as a veterinary medicine.
The consequences of the ban will hit both fatteners and consumers. The consequences are a treatment emergency, a painful end for large stocks of birds, jeopardy for turkey farms, the development of an uncontrollable black market, and an increase in imports of poultry from third countries, where many substances that are banned in the EU are used with few or any controls. Only last week antibiotics of the nitrofuran group that are banned in the EU were found again in cheap imports of meat from third countries.
Logically, mixed feed manufacturers will now have to stop using Nifursol by January 2003 at the latest if there is to be no more such feed in the silos by the beginning of March.
My question to you this evening, although I do not know whether you can answer it, is: what solutions do we now have available? Personally I find it hard to understand how the Commission can on the one hand, in the report in my possession, on the Commission’s draft of which we worked very hard – approve the use of histomonostats,–– while on the other hand, in another regulation, banning the only product in existence on this market. I therefore have a few questions. What are we to say to the fatteners? What are they to do? What forms of treatment are available to them? And secondly, is the Commission aware that European production is continuing to decline, is disappearing from the market in the European Union and that we are being increasingly exposed to third country imports of turkey meat, although we still do not know what quality standards those imports come up to?"@en1
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