On Monday 23 June, at the Agriculture and Fisheries Council in Luxembourg, some fifteen delegations - including France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Slovakia and Romania - supported the Czech Republic’s initiative calling on the European Commission to harmonise the provisions governing the reserved names of animal-origin foods.
According to these countries, the aim would be to give these meat names protection similar to that already afforded to dairy products or honey.
In this context, several ministers welcomed the Commission’s initiatives to promote European livestock farming.
“Plant-based products differ substantially from food products of animal origin, particularly in terms of composition and nutritional value. It is therefore essential [...] [not] to mislead the consumer”, stresses a note (https://aeur.eu/f/hlp ) from the Czech Republic.
For these countries, adopting European regulations would provide consumers better protection against misleading information and avoid regulatory fragmentation in the EU.
They hope the issue will be resolved through a revision of the regulation on common market organisation. Belgium, however, considers that the appropriate legal basis would be Regulation 1169/2011 on providing food information to consumers.
While he supports the initiative in principle, European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Christophe Hansen pointed out that the issue of legal protection for food names remains complex: “We need to strike a balance between the legitimate protection of our farmers and that of our consumers. Proportionality is essential. We will be looking into this as part of the CMO regulation’s upcoming revision”, he said.
Last October, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the French decree banning the use of names such as ‘steak’ and ‘sausage’ for plant products infringed European law (see EUROPE 13497/21). (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)