Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-04-Speech-3-046"
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"en.20001004.4.3-046"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, after the issue of the composition of feedingstuffs for animals, if we are to eliminate mercury, lead, arsenic, DDT, etc., we must address the question of the way in which these products are marketed. This is, of course, all due to the BSE tragedy that turned into a real saga, with several episodes. Mr Böge dealt with the episode of the committee of inquiry in 1997, there was the episode of the ban on British beef, the episode of the labelling of meat and now we have the episode of labelling animal feedingstuffs. Of course, farmers have the right to know what their cows are eating and the right to know whether their pigs are eating car sump oil, which contains dioxins.
Food must therefore be labelled to show the precise contents. This is a simple thing, but for ten years, we have sat and twiddled our thumbs. Admittedly, there are labels that tell half the truth, stating “contains oil”, but that could mean fish oil, vegetable oil, tallow or grease. Common sense, as our rapporteur said, would suggest that labelling should make a clean sweep and list all the ingredients. On this issue, however, we have been told that the intellectual property of manufacturers’ formulas must be protected, that monitoring compliance would be difficult, that the label would be covered with the list of nutritional values and raw ingredients and that the contents would vary according to the market in which they were sold. In short, then, people have tried to win some time.
Today, we have found a good solution, although nothing has been said about animal feedingstuffs containing GMOs, such as soya flour. Nor has anything been said about the responsibility of manufacturers, particularly in Britain, who were primarily responsible. Even if we are pleased with this progress, however, how can we forget that before we finally adopted measures it took ten years and 80 deaths, and in two years’ time we may well yet discover a zoonosis, a health disaster?
I do not know, Mr Byrne, if the European Commission is at risk of dying from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, but given the slow pace of your lives, I can take pleasure in the fact that you will surely not die of a heart attack."@en1
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