Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-04-23-Speech-3-379"
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"en.20080423.25.3-379"2
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"Madam President, I should first of all thank my colleague Mr Parish, Chairman of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, very much indeed for giving me the opportunity of coming here at this late hour to ask this oral question. He, unfortunately, has for many months had a longstanding arrangement to go to Denmark with Commissioner Fischer Boel and had to leave for Copenhagen this afternoon. So he sends his apologies for his absence and also sends his greatest respects to Ms Vassiliou and welcomes her to the Commission.
Therefore the result of the zero-tolerance regime is to reduce dramatically the amount of non-GM feed coming into the EU. So, even those poultry and pig producers who want to use non-GM feed find it incredibly difficult to access the quantities that they need, when they need them. Once again, this makes it much more difficult for them to compete fairly in open world markets.
If we really want to export our poultry and pig industry outside the EU and feed our citizens on Brazilian chicken and pork and even chicken from Thailand, all of which has been fed on GM, then the present policies of zero tolerance on non-GM feed and the appallingly slow licensing of GM feed within the EU are exactly the way to go about it.
Commissioner, we are delighted that you were so resoundingly endorsed as a Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection DG. We wish you well but we hope that you will be the first to resist the tabloid Frankenstein food mythology and put in place some policies that will allow our farmers to compete internationally on a level playing field.
This is a reality check. We have a very competitive and successful poultry and pig industry in the EU. They are completely unsupported. They do not receive a single farm payment; they do not receive any subsidy at all and they have to stand alone in the marketplace.
With poultry and pigs the biggest cost of production is the feed. Pigs and chickens do not graze the fields and therefore everything they eat is cereal-based. If you have an unsupported industry you must make sure that they have access to competitive feed from around the world.
In Europe we take over two years on average to license a perfectly safe GM product. Herculex, one of the few approved GM seeds, took 33 months to achieve EU approval. In the US the average approval time is half that: 15 months.
There is no excuse for this. With food prices and costs for the poultry and pig industry both rising, we cannot afford this time delay in licensing feed. We have got to speed things up.
In the US many of these GM products are by-products from the bioethanol industry and they are significantly cheaper than feeds that can be accessed here in the EU by our poultry and pig producers. So all we are doing is denying ourselves access to cheaper world market feeds, making it virtually impossible for our producers to compete and therefore we are in grave danger of haemorrhaging jobs and exporting our industry outside the EU.
Those purists who say that we must not have poultry or pigmeat produced with GM feed will not have won any kind of victory if we deny ourselves these feeds. The end result will be that we will have lost our industry to our non-EU competitors while we continue to import poultry and pigmeat from animals that have been fed on precisely the same GM feed that we have denied our producers access to. This is the politics of the madhouse.
We also need clear labelling and products so that consumers can make an informed choice. They must know if the meat they eat has been fed on GMs. With rising food prices, much GM-fed meat is cheaper and this gives consumers the choice and access to low-cost meat if that is what they desire.
The other major issue so far as feed is concerned is zero tolerance on non-GM feed coming into the EU. Again, the great hair-shirted brigade can beat their chests and say that we are making sure that there are no traces of GM products in any non-GM feed that is entering the EU. But what is the effect of zero tolerance when a shipload of non-GM soya is being loaded in Brazil to be brought to the EU? There is a chance that a very tiny residue of GM soya could be picked up through the loading equipment at the port in Brazil. When that ship docks in the EU, if even a small trace of GM soya is found, even if that soya has been licensed in the EU, the whole cargo can be turned away."@en1
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