Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-02-14-Speech-1-114-000"
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"en.20110214.15.1-114-000"2
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"Mr President, we are talking here about the safety of food for humans and the safety of feed for animals. These are, obviously, top priorities for the European Union. Needless to say, this is an important piece of legislation and one which will hopefully never, or never again, have to be applied, because this is about radioactive contamination. The highest safety standards are therefore called for.
We are assuming that the Council and the Commission will take this into serious account, in the interest of all Europeans, and that they will move with us in this direction.
The current standards and regulations have been in place for at least 20 years. Meanwhile, the constitutional and social contexts have evolved radically. We therefore need a number of adjustments. It is these improvements which, hopefully, this House will adopt tomorrow and which, let us hope, the other institutions will take into account.
First of all, it is essential – and I hope that the Commissioner shortly will be able to take note of what I am saying – that the Commission should play a key role in such emergencies, and not the Council. It is in the interest of all citizens, Commissioner, that the situation after a nuclear accident is managed by the Commission, given that this quite clearly transcends the interests of individual national governments.
The current regulation, to which I have just referred, was therefore laid down in the immediate wake of the Chernobyl crisis. That was in 1986. It must therefore be updated and brought in line with the new institutional environment within the European Union.
Secondly, ladies and gentlemen, it goes without saying that the Commission should update established standards to take account of technological progress, and has done that on the basis of consultation with experts, experts in the field of public health and experts in the field of food safety. That goes without saying, but has not been spelled out as such in the current regulation. We are therefore proposing to make explicit provision for this.
In this context, we explicitly ask the Commission to publish a report next year on the adequacy of the standards as they currently stand, on whether it is desirable, possibly, to do some more work on what is known as the list of minor foodstuffs and on whether it is still appropriate to maintain that list any longer.
My third point, Commissioner, Mr President, concerns the definition of baby food, which is obviously a very delicate matter and one which should be improved. The current text has not really been adjusted to the recent European food regulations and it is essential that we intervene in this text. That is a proposal we are going to present to the plenary tomorrow.
Fourthly, Parliament has proposed to provide compensation to any farmers who might be affected by such an incident. No explicit provision has yet been made to that effect. We ask the Commission, and we will do so tomorrow by an oral amendment, to consider this and, if it so wishes, to come up with a proposal.
Last but not least, there is the question of the legal basis. Commissioner, this Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs has unanimously found that this question should come under Article 168(4) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. After all, this is about – and here I am quoting the Treaty – ‘measures … which have as their direct objective the protection of public health’, end of quote. This, of course, is a fundamental change, because it means that we will have to adjust the codecision procedure, rather than resort to consultation on the basis of the Euratom Treaty."@en1
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