Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-01-Speech-4-018"
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"en.20010201.3.4-018"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, speaking on behalf of the Greens at the time of the parliamentary resolution on the BSE crisis, I told you that the European countries which claimed to have no cases of mad-cow disease were the countries that were not looking for it. Alas, you will see that subsequent events have proved me right, as they often prove us right when we give timely warnings of the risks to which the earth and mankind are exposed by unbridled liberal economics, but our warnings are not heeded until the predicted disaster has come to pass.
Today I can say that the BSE crisis has been underestimated by the Commission and, more especially, by the Member States. Under pressure from which lobby? Everyone in this Chamber knows that Europe's main mission since 1993 has been to operate as a large market without frontiers, a market where anything can be bought and sold, even infected meat and bone meal. Has this self-centred policy now been abandoned? I have returned from Porto Alegre, and I can tell you that the Brazilians and Argentinians whom I met there admit that they have been doing the same thing in various places, namely feeding animal carcasses to cattle. I very much fear that, if they started looking, they too would find cases of BSE.
Be that as it may, fifteen years after the first case of mad-cow disease, Community decisions are still lagging several steps behind the disease. The last meeting of the Council of Agriculture Ministers was no exception to this rule. Instead of purely and simply banning the use of animal fat in certain forms, as the Scientific Veterinary Committee had tacitly suggested, the Council preferred to take a half-measure by prescribing heat treatment of fats.
The update you have just presented to us, Commissioner Byrne, is disturbing on several counts. We have learned, for instance, that one Member State allows the inclusion of untreated specified-risk materials in feed mixes, that others are not managing to remove the spinal column at the abattoir and that some of the approved tests have turned out to be rather ineffective in the field.
Lastly, I must ask some questions about the number of tests conducted by Member States, because some of the figures pose problems, such as those from Portugal, Greece and the United Kingdom, the country at the source of the epidemic, which conducts only 600 tests per day, as against 37 000 in Germany and 150 000 in Ireland, for example.
What do you intend to do, Commissioner, to harmonise these campaigns properly, to ensure that the same level of protection against this epidemic is finally guaranteed throughout Europe and that the consumer does not have to bear the whole cost alone?
Reorientation is necessary and must be governed by two objectives: to transform the common agricultural policy into a system of safe food production and to extend such reforms beyond cattle farming and the current crisis by addressing the issue of battery rearing in general, rather than clearing up one mistake to go on to cause another. After beating your breast about the BSE crisis today, Commissioner, do not now go on to promote genetically modified organisms."@en1
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