Brussels, 11/04/2002 (Agence Europe) - The Spanish Presidency will present to the Agriculture Ministers of the fifteen Member States, during the Council on 22 April, a document proposing to launch a debate on the setting up of European veterinary policy that would meet the new challenges of compensating costs of livestock farming crises, new consumer expectations and the commitments taken by the EU at international level to defend its health system. In this "memorandum", the Presidency invites the European Commission to increase the budget of the current Veterinary Fund and to guarantee "increased transparency" in the management of its funding. It also proposes, in parallel to or as an alternative solution, the creation of insurance programmes in the stock farming sector, cofinanced by national budgets.
The Spanish Presidency considers that the food safety crises that have appeared over recent years have demonstrated to what extent the only financial instrument available to the EU to face up to the cost of epizootics (BSE, foot and mouth, swine fever), namely the Veterinary Fund (established in 1990 and aimed solely at financing specific action to counter certain epizootics of up to one hundred million euros) is no longer adapted to the current situation. "The comparison between the fund's budget and the costs occasioned by BSE (EUR 5 billion over five years) or by foot and mouth (EUR 1 billion in one year) is striking", the document says. It recalls that the Commission has often been forced not only to present supplementary and rectifying budgets (SRB) but also to take funds originally intended for market measures in order to allocate them to bovine slaughter or destruction expenses, or to screening for the various transmissible spongiform encepalopathies (TSE).