Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-06-12-Speech-2-048"
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"en.20010612.3.2-048"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, first of all I should like to thank our rapporteur and congratulate him on the importance and the quality of the work he has done. This regulation setting up a European Food Authority will, I hope, help to restore the confidence of European consumers. It therefore seems to me to be extremely important that this authority, which should constitute the mainspring of the Union’s strategy on food safety, can become operational as rapidly as possible, and in any case by the beginning of next year.
The rapporteur is right to emphasise the need to make a clear distinction between the tasks and responsibilities which will fall to the future authority and those which are the responsibility of the Commission. Thus it must be quite clear that, although the authority is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the rapid alert system, in other words that tool which is so essential in risk assessment, it is the Commission, in other words the political decision-making body, which has to retain the responsibility for risk management, in other words it must be in control of the measures to be taken.
In the same way, it is necessary to state that, although one of the characteristics of the authority must be the scientific competence and independence of its experts, it does not actually have any political legitimacy of its own. In this respect, there are perhaps good grounds for regretting the fact that the name ‘agency’ has been dropped, because it was a better name to describe such a structure, whose powers must be of a technical or scientific nature and must on no account become regulatory or executive. This is why it seems to me relevant, as the Commission proposes, to place this authority under the triple tutelage of the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament.
Finally, and in spite of everything, I should like to emphasise, as other Members have done before me, that unless we rethink our options and our common policies concerning agriculture, no authority, however effective, will ever be able to stem the tide of major crises like those that we have experienced recently."@en1
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