Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-16-Speech-1-101"
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"en.20021216.8.1-101"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank the Commission for the clarity with which it has presented the situation as regards the treatment of foodstuffs with ionising radiation in the European Union. I am also grateful to the Commissioner for the clarity of what he has had to say about this problem area.
As long ago as 1999, when we were working on the directive, our fear was that the Commission would not succeed in producing a comprehensive positive list by 31 December 2000. And what has happened? It will soon be 31 December 2002, and, rather than discussing whether or not to adopt the list, we are again going over the discussions we had in the days before the directive was drawn up.
Things cannot, I believe, be left as they stand, and the situation is unacceptable. The Commission, in its communication, notes that both the FAO and the WHO regard it as scientifically proven that irradiation is quite safe for consumers. The WHO, indeed, urges that it be used more, as the procedure reduces risks to the consumer. The Scientific Committee on Food notes, with reference to 17 product categories, that treatment with ionising radiation is harmless, and those categories include all those products treated to date in the countries of the European Union. It states that there have been no occasions on which the critical dose has been exceeded in the European Union.
It is noted in the Commission communication that the most important conditions for treatment with ionising radiation – licensing, labelling and control – have been met and that the methods for detecting irradiation have been validated, in other words, that they also meet requirements. I am slowly finding it intolerable that we are constantly, in this context, being told that there is the possibility of cheating, that there is room for fraud and so on. The detection methods are in place. We can determine whether products have been treated, be it legally or illegally. Why, then, do we constantly have to go over this discussion again and again?
We see, then, that all the conditions have been met for a positive list to be drawn up and for the Commission to deal with it. The Commission, though, is getting cold feet. The reasons for this are apparent from the survey that it has carried out, which, to take one example, discovered that the food manufacturers do not want this treatment. Why, then, do they not want it? As the communication makes perfectly clear, they fear a boycott of their products, as the European Union and this discussion itself have been permeated by an ideology which ignores all the scientific findings and simply refuses to accept all that has been worked out and set out to date. And so we go back to our discussions and to bemoaning this dreadful state of affairs.
It is then that the hygiene argument is produced. I helped draw up the directive on hygiene conditions in the handling of fresh meat. I would be the last person to want to cut anything out here, but we discussed HACCP when we worked on the current version of the food hygiene directive. It is perfectly clear to us that this is not acceptable everywhere, and that we have to use other methods as well in order to make products safer for consumers. That is what this procedure is there for. The only acceptable approach is for the Commission to draw up the positive list very quickly, and, moreover, not in the form it has now proposed. The real need is for change in the situation in the European Union. We cannot afford to keep on being weighed down by this ideological ballast."@en1
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