MEP Tonino Picula participated in the discussion about controls and activities undertaken to ensure the application of the law on food and animal feed, the rules on health and welfare, health, herbs, plant reproductive material and plant protection.
Picula stressed that "despite the fact that the EU has the highest standards of food safety in the world, the recent scandals with horse meat in Europe and the infected chicken and eggs in Croatia, which resulted in fatal consequences, show that the existing legislative framework is not sufficient."
Picula therefore supported the new regulation package, stressing that it should be adopted as soon as possible: "Europe is tired of food scandals, and in Croatia there are more and more citizens who want to see with their own eyes the origin of the food that comes to their table. The previous EU legislation was divided into more than 70 different regulations while the new package of five proposals provides a clear path of food from producers to consumers - literally, from the farm to the table".
As a member who works on the protection of authentic Croatian products on the EU level and points out their great importance for consumers as well as the producers, he emphasized the biggest paradox: "We test the home made products thoroughly, while in case of the products imported from the rest of the EU, we rely on a single health certificate for which there is often no guarantees! There has to be zero tolerance for selling medically defective products between EU Member States that didn't pass the adequate controls. The control costs can not be an excuse for endangering health and lives of our consumers!"
The Agri-food sector is the second largest sector in the EU which employs over 40 million people and produces higher value than 750 billion Euros per year. This package of measures was negotiated for 18 months, responds to the call for simplification of legislation and smarter regulations that have a single goal - safer food for citizens who no longer have to doubt the origin, better rules for producers that reduce the possibility of diseases and epidemics of animals and in the end: less administration for traders.