Federalimentare: EU rules also for labelling milk and meat derived products’ origin

Brussels – The European Commission « must take its own responsibilities» and propose a regulation for common rules for the labelling of meat and milk derived products.

The President of Federalimentare (Italian Federation of Food Industry), Luigi Pio Scordamaglia, criticizes the European Commission as « on one side, it states that this kind of measure would be too costly for the industry and, on the other side, it congratulates France to introduce this experimental measure». This creates a dangerous precedent, which could lead the single market to its break up”.

Last week the European Parliament has approved a resolution to ask for the labelling of meat and milk derived products, what do you think about this?

“The European Parliament has often urged the European Commission to take its own responsibilities, but for years the Commission has been totally silent in terms of proposed measures to regulate the origin of primary ingredients. This is what the Commission should do also to meet the consumers’ needs” and expectations.

“The European Commission is not consistent because, on one side it has published a study

showing that the cost-benefit ratio would be too big, namely that the cost would be disproportionally high for the transparency sake, which is a a legitimate position, per se. On the other side, it twits that France’s experimental (but basically compulsory) initial proposal is a good one. This is very bad both formally as it anticipates something it should be based on a technical assessment, as well as substantially as on one side there is nothing proposed nor done at EU level but, on the other side, France is allowed to do just anything. This is unacceptable”.

When we talk about derived products, are we also referring to lasagne, just to put an example, the ones around which the horse meat scandal had exploded ?

“The scope still needs to be clearly defined, the meat content still needs to be established (for lasagne this rate is very low). Presently, it’s primarily about cheese and cured meats”.

 One of the present proposals consists in introducing an indication of EU or not EU origin. Would you support this?

“This would be an excellent start provided the same rule applies for all the Member States. With the actual precedent the European Commission is supporting, the single market disappears and 28 markets with different rules would become the reality. Just as is has happened with GMOs (in the past the Member States were simply given the freedom to choose), the food traffic light (with some fears to take action to stop it), the European Commission unceasingly just ducks out, leading to the risky perspective of having just a half Europe”.