Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-10-Speech-2-010"
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"en.20040210.1.2-010"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, it seems to us that the current epizootic disease of avian influenza in Thailand and South-East Asia again raises acutely the question of these new pandemics, with the risks of repeated health crises, as we have seen in the recent past, which have destabilised farmers and also threatened consumers. We are told today that the whole of South-East Asia is affected, with 19 human victims – 14 in Vietnam and five in Thailand – and 50 million birds slaughtered on the Asian continent. One case has been reported in the United States. We would like to know, Commissioner, what is the likelihood of contamination and to what extent it is possible to say that the virus that has appeared in the US is or is not the same one as has appeared in Asia.
I would like to mention a number of precedents: bovine spongiform encephalitis, to which my colleague Mr Martinez repeatedly tried to draw the Commission’s attention over five years before it burst upon the world in the shape of the famous mad cow affair; foot and mouth disease in the UK and dioxin-contaminated chicken in Belgium. Last year there were cases of avian influenza in the Netherlands, not to mention the swine fever that recurs in our countries. I am glad that we have understood the full extent of the problem right away this time.
As my fellow Members have said, however, we also need to deal with the causes. While the causes of these diseases are sometimes concealed to avoid damaging the industry or turning away the consumer, we do – at least in the previous cases – have a pretty good idea what they are. We know it was mainly the quest for high yields and high-density farming on the one hand, as the previous speaker said, and, on the other, generalised free trade and the systematic opening of borders. This theory, which used to be stigmatised as the ‘free fox in the free henhouse’, fits the situation perfectly, the fox here rather symbolising free trade. Not only has it eaten the chicken but, what is far worse, it has contaminated it.
True, the Commission has proposed an embargo on imports of Thai chicken until August 2004, but that seems to us inadequate given the scale the phenomenon is assuming.
Remember, Commissioner, that the Commission hauled France before the Court of Justice in Luxembourg for refusing to lift the embargo on British beef when there was no guarantee that the British meat was harmless and BSE was still wreaking havoc in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
France, which produces 2 million tonnes of poultry a year, 35 to 45% of it for export, could return for a time – and not only France but others too – to traditional markets from which it was ousted by competition from Brazil, which practices dumping prices and where, it also appears, production conditions are atrocious. So much so, incidentally, that Europe’s number one poultry producer, Doux, has relocated to Brazil to take advantage of cheap labour and plentiful raw materials at low prices.
Systematic free trade not only destabilises our producers and our poultry farmers, it also forces us, as part of the WTO, to accept ridiculous clauses that make you wonder what they have got to do with a free economy and a free market. I am thinking of the one that was signed at the GATT in 1994 stipulating that Europe commits itself to importing 5% of its poultry meat consumption, or one million tonnes in 2002. For the present there has been no transmission of avian influenza between humans, but if there is a risk of a world pandemic and if the H5N1 virus were to combine with a human virus like the flu virus to create a new, highly contagious fatal strain, then I think, Commissioner, that the EUR 1 million credit you have just announced could prove tragically inadequate."@en1
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