Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-04-Speech-3-389"
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"en.20090204.20.3-389"2
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"Madam President, this discussion has been really lively, and many questions have been put. Many assumptions have also been made, and I would agree with Mrs Doyle that we have to be patient and wait for this investigation to finish. Then we can draw our conclusions and take decisions for the future. One thing I have to say – I was not involved at the time but have heard about it – is that similar incidents happened in Germany and in Belgium, and there was wide information about those incidents in all the Member States. So I would have thought that a prudent Member State would have taken more stringent control measures. But even with the most stringent control measures such a thing may happen, either because of fraud, or because of negligence, or whatever. Our responsibility is to see to it that we have legislation – which I believe is now satisfactory – and to see that Member States comply with that legislation. Our duty as the Commission is to have controls and to see that Member States do their duty.
FVOs make their inspections, and FVO reports are open to the public, so the extent to which there is a compliance with our laws can be implied from those reports, which are even prepared on a country by country basis.
A number of you raised the issue of traceability, which is indeed one of the main pillars of general food law and is the responsibility of the food business operators, who must be able to indicate from whom they have purchased and to whom they are selling. However, the level of detail or specificity of internal traceability chosen by the food business operator determines the final economic loss to be borne by food business operators in the case of recall. In this particular case, what the traceability rule in Ireland required was simply the date of production, and not the farm where the meat came from. That was why it was necessary to recall all the meat produced in those two months. If stricter traceability rules were applicable (which would have costed more, of course) only the meat which was identified as originating from that particular farm would have been recalled. So one has to decide: pay more and have better traceability rules or pay less and, in the final analysis, bear the loss.
It was mentioned that we have provided aid, as a Commission – although the payment of compensation is not my responsibility, but that of Commissioner Fischer Boel – and I must say that what was paid in this case was paid on the same basis both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. I have here some figures. The Commission has introduced a private storage aid scheme for Northern Ireland, and under this scheme up to 15 000 tonnes can be stored for a maximum of six months. The budget for that measure is EUR 6.9 million. A similar private storage scheme was also adopted in the Republic of Ireland. Under that scheme, up to 30 000 tonnes can be stored for up to six months, with a maximum budget of EUR 13.9 million. In the Republic of Ireland there was also a disposal scheme which was cofinanced by the Community and which cost EUR 20.6 million. No payments were made by the Commission directly to farmers either in the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland, because there is no legal base for such compensation.
Summing up, I would say that we have good laws, but in the future we have always to be vigilant. We must make sure that those laws are applicable by the Member States, and we need the cooperation of the Member States. On the Commission side, we have to keep up our controls and make sure that Member States comply with our regulations.
Moreover, once we receive the results of the inquiries and investigations, we can then think about the future. If we believe that there is scope for improving our regulations, we shall have no hesitation in doing so."@en1
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