March 22, 2020 / By mobanmarket
MEPs and national diplomats are to intensify negotiations next week on a law governing food labelling. Parliament and Council move to end-game on food-labelling law
Officials on both sides are hopeful of reaching agreement and so avoiding the fate of the recent talks on cloning, when three years’ work collapsed in failure.
MEPs, national officials and European Commission officials will meet in Brussels on Tuesday (24 May) to begin to bridge their differences on the food-labelling law. The aim is to conclude a final deal in July. Already more than three years in the making, the regulation will change the rules about the nutritional information (fat, salt, sugar and more) that manufacturers are required to put on packaging.
The most contentious point will be extending country-of-origin labelling. Today, only a limited number of products, such as beef, fresh fruit and vegetables, are required to carry labels showing their origin. Some MEPs – notably Socialists, Greens, left-wingers and Eurosceptics – are calling for a major extension of country-of-origin labels for other fresh and processed foods. This would mean that chicken sandwiches and beef lasagne would have to carry such labels – an idea attacked as “impractical” by the food industry.
The Council of Ministers is prepared to support a limited extension of such labels to fresh meat, but argues that putting country-of-origin labels on processed foods – where meat or milk is the main ingredient – should be the subject of a feasibility study before it is included in the law.
The Council has limited room for manoeuvre, because any move in either direction could break a carefully-balanced consensus. “What we have is a fragile balance in the Council,” observed one national official.
The Parliament’s hand may also be weakened because MEPs are split. The head of the Parliament’s negotiating team, Renate Sommer, a German centre-right MEP, is opposed to extending country-of-origin labels.
Another divisive issue between the Council and Parliament is the prospect of labelling transfats, the fatty acids linked to heart disease, which extend the shelf-life of many processed foods. The Parliament wants mandatory labelling of transfats, but the Council has doubts. National diplomats were debating the issue yesterday (18 May) as European Voice went to press.
Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, a Dutch Liberal MEP involved in the talks, said that a deal was within reach. “The compromise is lying on the table. We just have to go through these three meetings to grab it together,” he said. He insisted that Parliament’s divisions would not stand in the way: “We have a Parliamentary line and we have to defend that. And we will all have to move a little to come to a compromise.”
All MEPs are scheduled to vote on the food information law in July – the final hurdle that must be cleared to agree the law.
The arguments about cloning continue to simmer. This week the Council secretariat took the unusual step of issuing a statement to correct an MEP’s representation of a Council legal opinion.
Kartika Liotard, a Dutch left-wing MEP, had accused the Council and Commission of “scaring” people into accepting their position, by using the “false” argument that an EU ban on food products derived from the progeny of cloned animals might be challenged as breaching international trade rules. The MEP cited the confidential opinion of the Council’s legal service to justify her claim.
The Council hit back at her interpretation. “All measures under discussion at that time… entail risks as far as their compatibility with the WTO rules is concerned,” it said in a statement on Tuesday (17 May).
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