Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-25-Speech-3-207"
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"en.20050525.21.3-207"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner, we have now spent two years struggling with the Commission proposal on food advertising. In tabling it, the Commission is clearly going beyond its competences. It is not pursuing consumer protection, but is trying to nanny and gag consumers, for it sees the citizens of Europe as stupid, fat and gluttonous, and so nutrient profiles are to be used to divide foods into good and bad products, and this in accordance with a procedure that is scientifically untenable. Above all, this is to be done on the quite simply erroneous premise that advertising alone is to blame for Europeans’ expanding waistlines. Let me tell the Commission that this bears no relation to the real world! I wonder more and more frequently which planet you come from. Advertising that is not expressly permitted is then to be banned in the future. Of course advertisements must not lie! No one wants that. But we do not need advertising censorship. After all, we already have a law that protects consumers from misleading advertising. And of course advertising is the elixir of life for the food sector in this overcrowded food market. Innovation in this sector is only possible if one product can distinguish itself from another. Only in this way can it be successfully promoted and marketed. And innovation is ultimately also of benefit to consumers, who consequently have access to better and better products.
Innovation is key to a company’s success and thus secures jobs. Do you have any idea how many jobs a law like this would destroy? You are creating a bureaucratic monster: a laborious and lengthy authorisation procedure for every single advertising slogan from 25 Member States, obviously to be submitted translated word for word into all 20 official languages!
This would deal the last deathblow to our SMEs. But they would of course already be overstretched by the ongoing need to provide up
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date scientific proof. Why should people no longer be allowed to say, ‘Fruit is healthy’? Because there may be a type of fruit that is too sweet for the Commission?
We are making ourselves a laughing stock. This is the kind of thing that fosters political apathy and euro
scepticism. I urge you, Commissioner, to withdraw this proposal for good. I would have said this to you earlier, but you do not seem so keen to talk to us troublesome parliamentarians. Perhaps you should have come down from the glass tower of the Berlaymont building into the depths of our offices and attended a meeting of our committee. Then you would know that we will also be mobilising all of our resources tomorrow in the plenary to put a stop to this nonsense of the nutrient profiles in Article 4 and several other things besides."@en1
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