Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-25-Speech-3-052"
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"en.20001025.2.3-052"2
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"Mr President, my colleague Mr Bowis has played a fine hand with the cards which he has been dealt. But I intend to ask whether those cards should have been dealt at all.
Over and over in this House we discuss the details of proposals which have been put before us but we fail to ask whether those proposals should be there at all. We already have food safety agencies in most Member States. We have scientific committees advising the Commission. We have the World Health Organisation in Geneva. What will a European Food Safety Agency add? It will largely duplicate the activities of existing agencies.
Its main function is public relations. It is driven by the desperate need to persuade a sceptical public that the European institutions are delivering something – anything – of value. Would the new agency have prevented the British BSE crisis or the Belgian dioxin crisis? As Mr Blokland rightly says, almost certainly not.
We need to recognise the law of diminishing returns. As we create new levels of bureaucracy and spend ever more money we get less and less in return. We are told we cannot question the value of money spent on human health. Yet, as politicians allocating finite resources, we must ask these questions. Would the vast cost of this new agency be better spent on cancer research or smoking prevention or road safety? Almost certainly these areas would deliver better value in terms of lives saved, yet no one is prepared to ask the question.
I turn to the question of location for the agency. In my view its main task should be to coordinate better the work of existing agencies. The heads of national agencies should constitute its board. These people should continue to sit at their own desks, in front of their own computers. The location of the agency should therefore be not in Barcelona, Helsinki or Italy, but on the Internet, in cyberspace. It would be efficient, transparent and accessible. This would be a truly twenty-first century solution."@en1
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