Brussels, 14/01/2014 (Agence Europe) - In an effort to put a stop to the increasing number of fraud related food scandals, the European Parliament is supporting a hard line and is calling for a legislative proposal to ensure that indicating where the meat in prepared meals comes from is made compulsory. This demand is included in a range of measures it is advocating in a resolution on the food crisis, fraud in the food chain and monitoring, adopted by an overwhelming majority (659 votes to 24, with 8 abstentions) on in Strasbourg Tuesday 4 January.
Esther De Lange (EPP, Netherlands), who drafted this own initiative which forms the basis of this resolution, emphasised that “the first problem is a lack of comparable data, which means that it is difficult to get an exact picture of the problem. (...) However, we know that we are talking about billions of euros here. Organised crime is clearly getting interested in this. Unlike the US, the European Union still has no common definition of 'food fraud', which has long been a blind spot of European institutions. Food fraud cases are the rotten apples that spoil matters for all those farmers, intermediaries and individuals who do respect the rules and destroy consumer confidence in food and food information”.
MEPs are therefore calling for an EU-wide harmonised definition of food fraud and call on the European Commission to strengthen the EU Food and Veterinary Office (FVO), which carries out inspections. They also call for the establishment of a European network to combat food fraud and a European register of food sector operators who have been found guilty of fraud, and propose that DNA tests should be used more widely, to eliminate any species fraud.
Parliament is calling for more thorough inspections of frozen foodstuffs and for a draft law to make labelling mandatory for meat and fish, as well as mandatory tracing of meat in prepared products and the extension of labelling rules for beef meat to all kinds of meat, including information about where this meat was raised and slaughtered.
In an effort to discourage fraudsters, MEPs are calling for dissuasive penalties. They also consider that food fraud penalties should be at least twice the estimated economic gains that result from the fraud. Marc Tarabella (S&D, Belgium) said that those guilty of fraud “should be severely punished”.
In addition to the scandal involving horse meat sold as beef at the beginning of last year, MEPs pointed out that other, more recent fraud cases have involved road salt being sold as table salt, alcohol containing methanol used in spirits, dioxin contaminated fats used in the production of animal feed and labels that state the wrong species of fish and the mislabelling of seafood.
The European Consumers Organisation, BEUC, was delighted with this vote. Camille Perrin, an expert in food policy, stated that “Parliament has given its overwhelming support to the approach demanded by European consumers for nipping food fraud in the bud. Measures to tackle fraud are vital, given that a new case of fraud was detected last month in France, which introduced unclean horsemeat into the food consumption chain”. (AN/transl.fl)