Strasbourg, 14/12/2006 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament is determined to block the gaps in the 2002 legislation on information on compound feedingstuffs. In Strasbourg on 12 December, the EP adopted the report by Friedrich-Wilhelm Graefe zu Baringdorf (Greens/EFA, Germany), amending in first reading (codecision) a proposal on animal feeds. This proposal takes into account the ruling by the European Court of Justice of 6 December 2005, which concluded that an exact declaration of the ingredients of animal feeds on request “cannot be justified by the objective of protecting public health” and “goes beyond what is necessary to attain this objective”. In addition, the Court ruled that the additional health protection for consumers was insufficient to justify the serious impact on the “economic interests of manufacturers” of which the claimants (British, Italian and Dutch) complain. This “open declaration” of the ingredients used in feedingstuffs is, therefore, challenged by the Court ruling, although it was one of the key demands of the European Parliament following the BSE crisis.
The Commission has announced that it intends to bring forward proposals for the reform of the legislation on foodstuffs and feedingstuffs in the middle of 2007. The EP believes that sporadic amendments going beyond the simple implementation of the Court ruling would only hinder the work of the Commission. In its amendments, the EP was content to put forward a compromise which took account of the Court of Justice judgment and the concerns of market operators. It maintained the principle of “providing exact information on request” of ingredients in feedingstuffs, but this contested article should only apply to the main ingredients of compound feedingstuffs and not “micro-ingredients” (those whose percentage by weight is less than 2% of the product). Feedingstuff manufacturers have argued that the issue of protection of intellectual property, as it was argued in Court, was of particular importance for raw materials present in small quantities in feedingstuffs.
The 2002 directive is not applied consistently by Member States: national transposition measures have been suspended by judicial decision in some Member States, but not in others, causing divergences in the application of the provisions of the directive, particularly those on providing the percentages of raw materials present in feedingstuffs, said the rapporteur. (lc)