Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-13-Speech-1-102"

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"en.20060213.11.1-102"2
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"Mr President, this is a very worthy report that has been a long time coming through the system. It has achieved as good a balance as one could expect, because I recognise that this is not an easy area in which to balance all the different interests. Two weeks ago, a poultry-processing plant in Northern Ireland closed with the loss of over 400 jobs, not to mention the other jobs on the farms and in the feed compound mills. The reason given was that they could no longer compete with cheap imports from Asia and South America. I happen to believe that there is no such thing as cheap food. If food is cheap, it is not meeting the standards. Therefore I have to ask myself: is the chicken meat produced to our existing standards, never mind the proposed increased standards? I support the part of the report that states, in Amendment 17, that we must insist on the same standards in third countries as in the European Union. At the moment we only pay lip service to this. We are tying the hands of our producers, our farmers, with bureaucracy and red tape, while allowing others to flood our markets with food that does not meet our standards. This goes beyond the poultry industry: it is in the pig industry and in the red meat industry as well. They all have the same problem. I welcome higher standards, but I want the same everywhere. We must give consumers the choice. We must have proper food labelling; it must be clear, so that wherever consumers shop they can make a clear choice about what they wish to buy. They must know where the food came from. In many instances the supermarkets in the European Union are worsening standards by forcing down food prices. As I said earlier, there is no such thing as cheap food; cheap food is sub-standard food."@en1
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