Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-05-Speech-2-021"
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"en.19991005.3.2-021"2
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"President Prodi, you rightly said that scientific information is always incomplete. It is always incomplete in the sense that scientific information nowadays is progressing, but it is the duty of those in politics to realise that until we are certain about specific aspects, we must not experiment on citizens. You mentioned a White Paper on Food Safety. We find this proposal interesting and all hope that it will not be like Delors’ White Paper on Unemployment, which, it appears, has still not created even a single job. Let us hope that the White Paper will make citizens’ lives healthier.
We also want legislation, immediately. We want to know who the inspectors are, and who inspects the inspectors, as an old Latin saying goes. From March onwards, there were delays – given that the crisis happened as late as May, when Belgium’s dioxin crisis was exposed – which shows that there are not enough food safety checks and that analyses of our daily diet to check for the possible presence of PCBs and dioxin or other contaminants are, in practice, non-existent or incomplete.
To move on to another matter, we believe – and there have been various surveys in past years which uphold this – that large-scale distributors often ‘like’ to coat defrosted meat with toxic substances in order to put it back on the market. In 1990, we protested at the scandal of the gelatine-coated beef, also from England, which hit the headlines in 1992, and of which consumers bore the brunt.
We all know what dioxin is made up of: chlorine, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. It is insoluble in water, is heat-resistant and lingers for hundreds of years. I do not think it is very sensible to keep consuming it every day. There is meat meal in animal feedingstuffs, which is made from abattoir waste along with a mix of blood, feathers and carcasses.
Since 1995, the European Union, in the shape of the Commission, has ruled that, following the mad cow affair, meat meal is no longer permitted for ruminants. Let us consider ruminants. Meat meal was fine for fish, fine for chickens, sheep and pigs. The consequence is that by continuing this system, we ended up with the Belgian crisis. Chickens continued to eat meat meal. How did we discover that there was excessive pollution? When the threshold was exceeded by an extra 1500 points, eggs no longer hatched to produce chicks and then they said, “well, maybe something’s wrong – even with all those checks!” So, since 1995, meat meal has been replaced by fish meal, but then, if we investigate a little – because there have been very few investigations in recent years – we discover that fish meal contains a high percentage of meat meal, which is still made with carcasses and feathers in abattoirs. I believe that until today, only France has had the intelligence to say, just a moment, let us change to vegetable feed because we can no longer guarantee our consumers’ safety. And now we hear the European Union saying – and the rumour has been going round since August – that it wants to authorise meat meal residue for up to 0.15% of the total feed. But we must be aware that, if we look closely at the figures, 0.15% of 4000 tonnes of feed for cows means 6 tonnes. I do not think this is an acceptable percentage if we want to protect our health.
The Mario Negri Institute in Milan has shown that for Italians, dairy products, meat and fish are the biggest sources of PCB contamination.
We should also include in the debate the matter of the order…"@en1
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