Country of origin labelling

Schreijer objects to plan that will make food more expensive

If the European Parliament gets its way, food prices could rise by almost 10% since producers of ‘lightly processed’ dairy and meat products will be required to figure out the country of origin of each and every ingredient.

‘This has nothing to do with quality or food safety’

“Unworkable and unaffordable,” is how Annie Schreijer-Pierik (Dutch MEP, CDA) describes the plan, which was supported by the Parliamentary Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety on 22 March. “This will cause unnecessary costs for consumers and will be disadvantageous for the farmer as the primary producer.” 

Bureaucracy

A number of MEPs have submitted a resolution calling for it to be mandatory to list the country of origin for certain food ingredients. They seem to believe that this is simple to do. But even the European Commission has warned that the extra bureaucracy would drive up prices: a dairy cooperative would always have to register which country the milk had come from and perhaps even introduce separate production lines.

Extra problem 

“This has nothing to do with quality or food safety,” says Annie Schreijer. “The EU food safety rules already apply in every member state. The EU legislation means that milk is equally tasty, healthy and safe, whether it comes from Twente or Münsterland, for example.” The plan presents an extra problem because it does not clearly define what is meant by ‘lightly processed’ dairy and meat products. “That would require us to draw up many more pages of rules – which is precisely what we as the Parliament and the European Commission are trying to move away from!”

Schreijer and the Christian-Democratic EPP party are lobbying to persuade the entire parliament to reject this plan in the near future.