Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-05-14-Speech-3-253"
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"en.20030514.10.3-253"2
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"Mr President, I rise as the draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. For that reason alone I will not follow Mr Parish in his more provocative remarks. I advise him to look up the number of animals for which compensation was claimed before he uses his total figures for mass slaughter - as hideous as that undoubtedly was.
I am sure that the Commissioner can appreciate the need to be practical. He has shown that. The tenor of this debate will be set by the degree to which we can also preserve our humanity and life in all its infinite variety.
I simply want to say to the rapporteur that the way in which he did this job, both on the temporary committee and subsequently, is a template for the way in which this work should be done. He was considerate, courteous and thorough. I think the UK Government, which found itself in the eye of the storm, would also apply those words to him and appreciated this.
The Commission has moved, in large measure, to implement what we in the temporary committee recommended. The arguments will always return to the exact relationship between stamping out through culling and vaccination - whether to live or die - in a society that both cherishes its FMD-free status, yet has proper moral scruples about the means
employed to return to it. These arguments will move with the science. We are right to prioritise the research needed. I would like some kind of estimate from the Commissioner as to how that research is progressing.
The epidemic moved with terrifying speed. As has been said during the current SARS outbreak, the virus had its own rage to survive. It was awful to see that speed. Movement restrictions were not effective in the early stages. We had 50 000 sheep on the move, largely untraced, when the virus struck. I am sure we all agree that the mass culls that followed should never be seen again. They traumatised whole communities. Member States now have a wider discretion as to how they control the outbreak and the sequence to be followed in emergencies, from stamping out to vaccination.
I would like to emphasise, as Mr Blokland did - and it came through in our report - that there is a moral dimension to this. Unless we have an ethical element in farming it is unlikely that we will have commendation in the future for measures that we might take the next time this happens.
As far as our own committee is concerned, we needed to emphasise three things to the Commission. One is faster updating of contingency plans subject to practicability. We need to look at the seamless nature of the world we live in, in terms of the buying and selling of foodstuffs. Perhaps the Commissioner could say a word on what the FVO is doing about looking at the movement of foodstuffs into the country, given some of the problems we have had in recent times.
We need to be able to tell the public, as consumers, much more forcefully why it is that meat from vaccinated animals is safe to eat. We cannot have a pro-vaccination policy unless we have public acceptance of it, which goes with that greatly changed consumer standpoint.
While our own Food Standards Agency argued this case in Britain, it found itself confounded by the negativity of too many producers and too many retailers.
Finally, we should take special measures, as others have said, to preserve rare breeds, an indispensable part of the animal gene pool, so that they are not swept away by some new pandemic."@en1
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