What caused the European horsemeat crisis?
In a meeting in Brussels on Thursday, EU health and consumer policy Commissioner Tonio Borg told members of the European Parliament’s health and food safety committee that it was a lack of proper controls and dissuasive sanctions on fraud in European Union (EU) countries that had caused the scandal.
“This is not a question of legislation – the legislation is in place and is good legislation,” Borg stated. “It requires labelling of ingredients in each and every food product containing meat,” he added, defending existing EU food laws. “It’s a problem of enforcement.”
Jean-Luc Mériaux, secretary general of European Livestock and Meat Trading Union (UECBV), agreed. “The fraud is the act of a very small minority of operators and involved a tiny percentage of the EU meat and meat products production,” he said, noting that the current legislation should not be questioned because of the fraud.
According to EU rules, member states are responsible for implementing the so-called farm-to-fork food safety legislation that has emerged from the Brussels policy pipeline. “The frontline of the enforcement has to remain in the hands of the member states,” the EU Commissioner noted to the committee, adding that the European Commission did not have the legal and administrative capacity to enforce laws directly.
But MEPs feared the capacity of EU countries to carry out mandated checks has diminished under the weight of austerity. And the European Commission, which monitors the number of random checks national veterinary authorities perform in slaughterhouses and food companies, will release data on this topic in mid-April. But the random nature of inspections is one of the underlying causes of the current scandal, according to Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness. In her view, national food safety authority checks should be more frequent.
This, coupled with a lack of hard sanctions for those committing fraud in the food chain, helped to create an atmosphere of laxity where the mislabelling of horsemeat was more likely to take place, MEPs believed.
“It’s almost risk-free to do wrong today,” Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter told a parliamentary debate earlier in February. “We have the problem of [a] food authority seeing [the food] industry as partners and friends and not taking the role of the responsible parents: when a company does wrong you should have a fine or a prison penalty,” he explained.
According to information provided by the European Commission’s health and consumer policy spokesperson Frédéric Vincent, at the moment Brussels does not have an overview of sanctions applied in EU countries for mislabelling of food and meat products.
This could change in future, Borg suggested. Moreover, he is preparing a proposal asking member states to introduce dissuasive sanctions against food fraud that are at least equal to the resulting economic gain: “This would be better than imprisonment, although we shouldn’t even exclude imprisonment itself,” Borg added.
UECBV’s Mériaux said he believed this was a good lesson to be drawn from this scandal. Moreover, he was sure that food business operators will strengthen their audit system. “As far as I know, neither the farmers, nor the slaughterhouses or the deboning halls industries are involved in the fraud,” he told Globalmeatnews.com, underlining the innocence of slaughterhouses in the scandal so far.
And EU lawmakers are not the only players drawing lessons from this crisis. Retailers, who had to withdraw the mislabelled food products from their shelves, have pledged to review the management of their supply chains and traceability, according to Marina Valverde López, food and nutrition adviser at EuroCommerce in Brussels. For many that would mean improving rather than introducing food safety tests: “We change testing regimes regularly, based on intelligence from both the food industry and national food safety authorities to prevent contamination, but there was no indication that horsemeat was an issue,” she told Globalmeatnews.com.
Showing some perspective, Dirk Dobbelaere, secretary general of the Liaison Centre for the Meat Processing Industry in the EU (CLITRAVI), stressed: “These incidents are not tantamount to a systemic breakdown of the meat supply chain.” However, he believed this incident should make food businesses review their raw material and ingredients’ sourcing policies and, in some cases, even shorten their supply chains. He agreed testing was a good idea, but not used extensively and on a long-term basis. “Very extensive testing on a prolonged basis is not sustainable, due to cost and the constraints of testing equipment and laboratory facilities,” he added.
In the meantime, farmers are concerned about the long-term impact of this scandal on their livelihood. “Copa-Cogeca is concerned about the impact it will have on beef consumption and consequently on carcase prices,” said Amanda Cheesley, spokesperson for the EU’s farming federation.
