Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2015-02-09-Speech-1-138-000"
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"en.20150209.14.1-138-000"2
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"Mr President, it is almost exactly two years after the horsemeat scandal exploded across Europe, and we are still calling on the slumbering Commission to wake up and propose legislation for origin labelling for all meat, including meat as an ingredient. The horsemeat scandal was the biggest food fraud of the 21
century, and it exposed the lengthy, complex, and often very murky extremes of food chains in Europe. That some of the biggest supermarkets were able to just apologise, and claim they didn’t know where the meat came from, is astounding.
Whilst this scandal was – as rightly pointed out – caused by criminal activity, it underlined the extremely poor levels of traceability in the food chain, for consumers to know where their food is coming from. Ninety percent of consumers want to know the origin of their meat, both fresh and processed. This is a demand which has pre-dated the horsemeat scandal, and it still goes unfulfilled. The European Commission needs to stop being apologists for the corporate food industry and start acting to defend and represent the interests of the citizens that they supposedly work for. It would do well to avoid bleating out the big food industries’ arguments against and seek to implement as soon as possible what citizens and consumer groups have been calling for for years.
The Commission claims, in its 2013 report – we have heard it here – that the production costs could increase by anything up to 50%. We know that the consumer groups have shown that the opposite is true. Let us not forget that, when it was introducing country-of-origin labelling for meat – unprocessed meat – we heard these same arguments.
In Ireland, our voluntary labelling scheme, which includes meat and processed meals, has been a remarkable success, with almost 40 000 producers and 122 processors currently involved; this is a perfect example of the appeal and benefit to businesses such labelling can have. In fact, it is so successful that now what we have, because of the absence of mandatory labelling, is dishonest food manufacturers giving misleading representations of where the food comes from, labelling them as Irish recipes, traditional, farmhouse and local. So the European Commission needs to stop sticking its head in the sand and start listening to what consumers want."@en1
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"st"1
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