Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-02-Speech-2-282"
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"en.20020702.11.2-282"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, if genetically modified organisms were dangerous, they would have to be banned straight away. We are all agreed on that and we would do so at once. Today's debate is about labelling, about traceability; consumer information is the ultimate objective, together with freedom of choice, and we are all in favour of that. Consumers must be able to decide what they put on the table for themselves and for that we need labelling.
A whole series of genetically modified organisms has already been evaluated by scientific committees in the European Union. They found that these substances pose no threat to health or the environment. Nonetheless, information is important in the food sector and will, we think, help make the use of genetic engineering more widely accepted. Under the Commission proposal, GMOs will be labelled above a limit value of 1%. Following an amendment adopted in committee, which the European People's Party and the European Democrats voted against, this threshold will now be reduced to 0.5%.
All our demands must be made with one eye on the practicability and implementation of the regulations. This also raises the question of whether accidental contamination can be avoided completely. Experience has shown that zero tolerance can almost never be guaranteed. And there is a real problem, to repeat what the honourable Member just said, with the requirement to label all meat products, eggs and milk from animals fed on GMOs or feed containing GMOs. If the end product contains no DNA or genetically modified protein, there is no point in attaching a GMO label to it. At the end of the day, we can only label what is actually there. Is there a farmer who puts his animals out to pasture who can guarantee that they have not ingested wind-borne GMOs? This, together with the minuscule amounts in feed, would mean that, in the end, all meat would have to carry a GMO label. And that would be an untenable situation both for Europe's farmers and for consumers. For consumers because they would have to process meaningless information and for farmers because, technically, it is a non-starter. It is also unacceptable because, at the end of the day, we cannot hold farmers responsible for introducing and spreading GMOs."@en1
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