Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-07-03-Speech-4-163"
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"en.20030703.9.4-163"2
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"Mr President, I totally disagree with your analysis. We must remember the tragic situation facing the European Union in the autumn of 2001, when the appalling mad cow crisis emerged: exaggerated fears on the part of consumers led to a staggering fall in beef consumption and prices collapsed to unprecedented levels. Institutional caterers, hypermarkets and slaughterhouses refused to accept beef. Desperate farmers saw their livestock pile up and their feed stock disappear and threatened public order. And what proposals did the European Commission come up with? Feeble and ineffectual measures, which came nowhere near to addressing the scale of the crisis and the troubles that it was causing. It proposed optional measures for slaughter and destruction, which some Member States did not implement, in particular Germany and the Netherlands, which exported their problems to France and refused to come to the aid of their own farmers.
In this context, the measures adopted in France by common agreement between the public authorities and the farming profession, which consisted of setting, in conjunction with slaughterers, a buying scale at prices that also matched the ‘purchase for destruction’ prices set by the Commission and of appealing to importers to stop importing beef were perfectly appropriate to the situation and had an immediate calming effect. The Commission’s accusation of an illegal agreement appears, therefore, to be completely out of touch and scandalous, given the seriousness of the situation at the time and, to be quite honest, both absurd and irresponsible. I therefore urge the Commission to call off this action, which makes no sense and to dedicate all its energies to uncovering the real secret agreements which are the real threats to free competition."@en1
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