Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-13-Speech-2-311"
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"en.20070313.23.2-311"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I wanted first of all to thank you all for your contributions, and also to congratulate the officials of Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development and of the European Commission who gave me the necessary technical support.
I was keen to propose changes to the European Commission’s initial proposal to make this legislation more coherent and restrictive and I thank my colleagues for having supported me. In particular I asked for a system of penalties to be introduced in the event of failure to respect the rules, and I proposed amendments to include within the scope of the regulation meat-based products intended for human consumption, prepared, processed or cooked products. I also insisted that the sales description should be used at each stage of production and marketing.
I think, however, that certain points are not acceptable and could spoil the balance of the proposal for a regulation. I am talking about Amendments 8 and 12, which were adopted in the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development. Amendment 8 suggests that designations and IGPs (protected geographical indications) registered after the publication of this regulation could be exempted from it, and this is not consistent with the legislation as a whole. Designations of origin and protected geographical indications that have already been registered are not affected, but it is important that new AOCs and IGPs should be subject to the provisions of this regulation, otherwise they could be completely bypassed.
Amendment 12 calls into question the proposal for a regulation based on the criterion of age. In fact, as Annex II shows, the United Kingdom has chosen to give the description ‘veal’ to the first category, and the description ‘beef’ to the second category. This country’s specific requirements have, therefore, been taken into account.
Furthermore, I do not support the two new Amendments 26 and 27 presented to plenary. These two amendments introduce a new derogation that, in my opinion, is incompatible with Article 3 of the Regulation, as they allow a given Member State not to apply the regulation if its production of animals in the first category, aged less than 8 months, does not exceed 3% of the total production of animals aged less than 12 months.
Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to support me and to reject these four amendments which would reduce the scope of the Regulation, which is supposed to apply to the whole of the European Union and the scope of harmonisation of the first category ‘up to eight months’, which has been very difficult to attain.
This is a sensitive matter on which the Member States and the European Commission have been seeking an agreement since the beginning of the nineties, as the Commissioner has just reminded us.
The crux of the problem is that usually, when meat from calves is sold, no reference is made either to the type of feed the animals are given or to their age at the time of slaughter, although production practices differ greatly from one Member State to another. Consequently, because of differing interpretations, traders and consumers find themselves faced with very different products, but sold under one and the same description: veal.
As the European Commission has emphasised, this practice could disturb trade and encourage unfair competition. Studies show that the term ‘veal’ is a sales description that adds value and some traders make use of it to benefit from substantially higher market prices, when in fact they are marketing meat from young bovine animals with very different organoleptic qualities.
It is at the request of several Member States and of the European beef sector, who want clarification, that the Commission has set out its initial proposal, which I think is entirely appropriate.
The Commission proposal is to lay down precise sales descriptions according to age at the time of slaughter, a criterion that is significant enough and easier to monitor than the feeding regime. It proposes the introduction of two categories and the use of a letter to identify them: ‘X’ for animals slaughtered up to the age of eight months and ‘Y’ for animals slaughtered between the ages of nine and twelve months, letters that Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development has chosen to replace with ‘V’ and ‘Z’ in order to avoid confusions linked with gender.
For the first category, the sales description will continue to use the term ‘veal’. For the second, a different term will be used:‘
’ in French, ‘
’ in Italian, etc. On this subject I refer you to Annex II(B) of the regulation.
There is an exception for trade carried out on the domestic market in four countries, Denmark, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands, where, in order to take account of local customs and cultural traditions, it will still be possible to use the term ‘veal’ in the second category.
The terms ‘veal’, ‘veal meat’, or any other sales description defined in the proposal may no longer be used in the labelling of meat obtained from animals aged more than 12 months. Traders who wish to supplement the sales descriptions laid down in this proposal with other, optional information, such as the feed used, will, of course, be able to do so. Therefore, coming from Limousin, I could speak to you about ‘white veal’."@en1
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