Consumers at last protected

At last the European Commission is embarking on a policy with which consumers can readily identify and appreciate.

Altough legislation to protect them from health-threatening food, with serious consequences for those who produce and sell it.

Health and Consumer Affairs Commissioner David Byrne will announce on Wednesday a complete revamp of the EU’s food safety laws which for the first time will include criminal penalties for a wide range of offences which occur from the farmyard to the supermarket shelves.

When implemented, farmers and food retailers could end up in jail or have their businesses shut down under the new European legislation, which will, when passed, be imported into the domestic law of member states.

Before it reaches that stage the draft proposals contained in the putative regulation must go through two readings in the Council and the European Parliament, which can take anything up to 18 months.

Then it will be up to the individual states to lay down the appropriate sanctions to be applied to those convicted of contravening the new food laws, and to apply them.

While the proposals have been welcomed by the European consumer group BUEC as legislation for good food safety laws, they said putting them in place and implementing them in the member countries might be a problem.

The thrust behind the new legislation is to return to consumers a level of confidence and trust in the food products they purchase which has been seriously dented in recent years.

For that reason it should be embraced by producers and retailers alike, and certainly by the Government.

Any resistance to measures aimed at making food safer to eat would obviously be viewed with alarm and

apprehension by consumers generally, who have endured scary scandals about food too regularly.

Those recent scandals have included the use of hormones from an Irish pharmaceutical plant in pig feed in Holland; dioxins discovered in feed for chickens in Belgium and sludge being added to animal feed in France.

The regulation will cover, among other things, trying to sell food with banned or unsafe levels of additives, hormones or pesticides; failing to notify contagious animal diseases; slaughtering animals for meat without official inspection; marketing food that could be infected with BSE; failing to notify a range of diseases from foot and mouth to those that affect fish and shellfish, and causing cruelty to animals, including while they are being transported.

Because the regulation is wide-ranging in what it seeks to prevent, and the fact that for the first time offences will carry criminal penalties, influence will be brought to bear on the Government to dilute its scope and the consequences.

This is not an issue on which the Government should be seen to dither, because peoples’ health is far too important to be put sectional interests before it.

What has largely prompted this move from the Commission is that consumers want it, because they feel that some operators are not taking food safety responsibilities seriously enough.

In that, they are justified as has been witnessed too often by food contamination incidents which did not happen by accident