Thursday, 16th June 2011
You are what you eat? Public question time & debate
The following speech was delivered during a Public Question Time and debate entitled 'You Are What You Eat' in the City Council Chamber, Aberdeen.
On Tuesday this week I attended the umpteenth meeting on the Food Information Bill in the European Parliament in Brussels. I am a Shadow rapporteur on this controversial piece of legislation, which is in the final stages of its Second Reading. We have spent three years and endless hours discussing the minutiae of food labelling. On Tuesday we had the second so-called Trialogue, where the Parliament, Commission and Council must meet together and thrash out compromises on their sometimes widely divergent positions. These meetings always start in the early evening and go on into the wee small hours. Tuesday was no exception. We began at 6 o'clock and finally ended with a draft agreement at 01.45 am on Wednesday morning.
Spending a solid 8 hours discussing the font size for food information printed on chewing gum packets and whether or not allergens should be highlighted in the contents list on the back of a food package as well as the front, often leaves me despairing for my sanity. But there were crucially important political issues as well. For example, Parliament voted twice by a sizable majority in favour of labelling meet that has entered the general food chain and has come from animals that were slaughtered without pre-stunning. In other words animals slaughtered by the Muslim Halal or Jewish Schichita methods where their throats are cut.
Parliament felt that while they will continue to allow derogation for these types of ritual slaughter on religious grounds, the public has a right to know if they are unwittingly buying such products on the general market. For instance we understand now that many major hotel chains, sports stadiums and even schools and hospitals, serve only Halal meat, to save them the trouble of separating Halal from the other meats. This, in the eyes of the majority of MEPs, is an abuse of the derogation. Similarly, the Jewish community only eat the front-quarters of any animal slaughtered by the Schichita method. The rest of the animal, from the diaphragm back, is sold into the general food chain, but again the public have no way of telling if they are buying meat from an animal that was slaughtered in this way.
As you can imagine, this one issue became hugely controversial. As a supporter of the amendments, I was accused by the Jewish community of perpetrating the modern-day equivalent of the Yellow Star on their foodstuffs, which I felt was rather over the top and blatantly unfair when we were only debating a food labelling issue. However, the Council of Ministers simply refused to accept the parliament's views on slaughter and it seemed the whole Food Information Bill could founder on this one issue and three years work would go down the drain. That is why we had to talk into the wee-small hours of Wednesday until we reached a compromise. We agreed that on a guarantee from the European Commission that they will quickly bring forward a draft legislative proposal on animal welfare with a section specifically dealing with slaughter, we were prepared to drop our amendments.
But this is the sort of issue that we have to deal with. Other tortuous points were on the labelling of seemingly innocuous items like vegetable oil. Single source oils such as Olive oil, Sunflower oil, Rapeseed oil, are of course, already labelled as such. But there are many generic vegetable oils and margarines, which are made up of a variety of different oils, which are not listed on the labels. The producers of these oils lobbied hard to maintain the status quo, partly because they don't want to reveal the fact that they often use Palm Oil in their products and many people dislike Palm Oil because they regard it as environmentally unsustainable.
Again we had to fight hard to convince the Council of Ministers that the public have an absolute right to know what oils go into a vegetable oil or margarine that they purchase and finally we won.
The debate also ranged across things like Country of Origin labelling, trans-fats, portion sizes, fats, sugars, saturates and salts and a host of other issues. Over the course of the First and Second Readings of this Bill we have dealt with around 1000 amendments from MEPs and endless queues of lobbyists from business and industry. I think I have personally been lobbied by Ferrero Rocher on at least 6 occasions on a single amendment.
But food information is only part of the problem. We had another major piece of legislation which also took over three years to reach Second Reading and it fell apart some weeks ago after we failed to reach agreement in Trialogue and had to go into what is called conciliation procedure. The final conciliation meeting that I attended started at 6 in the evening and ended at 07.45 the next morning, with no agreement and some very tired and irascible participants. And the one thing that tore the Bill apart was cloning!
Parliament demanded that all meat or dairy products from cloned animals or their offspring should be labelled. Council vehemently disagreed. Parliament thought they could flex their muscles post-Lisbon Treaty and show the Council and Commission who is the boss. The Council and Commission refused to back down. Three years hard work bit the dust. We now have no Novel Foods Regulation. That means that we have to revert to the 1999 legislation which, for instance, lists Kiwi Fruit as a novel food and means that any shops wishing to sell Kiwi Fruit have to fill in pages and pages of forms!
So these are the sort of issues that have to be resolved if we are to have a workable single market. My primary function in the European Parliament is Fisheries. I am senior Vice President of the Fisheries Committee. Europe is only 60% self-sufficient in fish against a background of rising consumer demand for good, healthy fish products. We are the world’s biggest importers of fish at 10 million tonnes per year. By contrast, the US only imports 3 million tonnes. Over 80% of our own wild fish stocks in EU waters are over-exploited or nearing collapse. We are busy reforming the Common Fisheries Policy, which has been the root cause of this disaster. Micro-management from Brussels has bedevilled the industry for thirty years. So we need a radical overhaul of our fisheries management policies that devolves day-to-day management to the Member States, so that the stakeholders - the fishermen and scientists themselves - can have a direct input to their own management policies.
But meanwhile, we have to ensure that we have a level playing field for our own producers together with the producers who we import fish from outside the EU. We must avoid the temptation of over-regulating our own sector, while imports are allowed to pour in to Europe from fairly un-regulated sectors.
Having said that, I have made speeches and written angry articles in recent years over the 230,000 tonnes of Pangasius or Vietnamese River Cobbler which we import every year from fish farms in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. I accused these fish farms and processing factories of being dirty, polluted and producing a potentially toxic product which, because of its low price, was being snapped up in fishmongers and supermarkets across Europe.
The Pangasius sector, predictably, were rather rankled by this criticism and invited me to go to the Mekong Delta and visit fish farms and processing factories and see for myself the standards they observe. I have to say, I was mega-impressed. What I saw was as good as virtually anything I have seen in the EU. After all, these people have to comply not only with our strict standards of hygiene and welfare, but they are audited annually by TESCO, ALDE, MORRISONS, ASDA, SAINSBURY, CARREFOUR and any other supermarket chain they sell to. Their standards of bio-security are exceptional. I must admit that I had to eat humble-fish pie after my visit.
The lesson I learned is, that we must be prepared to compete in a global market, but we must also seek out and exploit the opportunities that these emerging markets provide. In one processing factory I visited in Vietnam, employing 4,000 people (mostly women), I observed that they were using breading and frying machines from the Netherlands, flash-freezers from the UK and other equipment from Belgium and a variety of EU Member States. There is huge potential for additional growth and these are opportunities we must rush to exploit. This is how we can actually create jobs and growth inside the EU and benefit from this expanding market to import fish from Vietnam.
Food security is clearly the most important priority for any government and for the EU. That’s why we devote 42% of our overall EU budget to the CAP, amounting to over 50 billion Euros per year. But this money guarantees good food security, good animal welfare, the preservation of the natural landscape, high quality produce, high standards of hygiene and the export of welfare, hygiene and environmental management to non-EU countries, all for around 23p per day for every citizen in the UK. I think its is money well spent.
So the key questions we need to answer are as follows:
1. Do you agree that CAP funding equates to good value for money?
2. Should the EU be more flexible in its approach to biotechnology and GMs, given that there are now more than 125 million hectares of GM crops being grown worldwide by 13.3 million farmers in 25 countries and yet we have kept our borders and our minds closed to GM technology? After all, it was organic beansprouts, which killed many people in the recent e-coli outbreak in Europe. GMs have never killed anyone or even made anyone ill.
3. Should we seek to ban all meat & dairy products from cloned animals and their offspring from entering the food chain?
4. Should we label meat that was slaughtered by the Halal or Schichita methods before it enters the general food chain?
5. Is clarity of food labelling something that the EU should pursue in the way we are doing just now?
