EU Ambassador Bruton Calls for a Commonsense Approach to Food Safety Issues

WASHINGTON — Ambassador John Bruton, Head of the EU Commission Delegation to the United States, said today that the European Union and the United States should pool resources as much as possible to ensure that consumers in the transatlantic marketplace get the safest and highest-quality food and that taxpayer dollars and euros are used cost-effectively.

"We should work to eliminate rules and regulations that hinder perfectly good products from crossing the Atlantic. There will always be some differences, and the U.S. has raised valid concerns about some EU rules. But this is a two-way street,” Bruton said.

"At a time when the European Commission is working hard to find solutions for American food and feed exporters wishing to market their products in Europe, I am surprised that none of the planned actions listed on the U.S. regulatory agenda for the first part of 2008 addresses the concerns European exporters have about entering the U.S. market,” he said.

Ambassador Bruton was referring to the latest semi-annual regulatory agenda published in December and covering the planned activities of U.S. departments and agencies for the next six to twelve months. Ambassador Bruton said he hoped inconsistencies could be ironed out in the course of 2008.

"For example, the EU and the U.S. worked together in 2005 in the World Animal Health Organization to forge a global agreement and recognition of the fact that boneless beef, under 30 months of age, does not pose any BSE risk,” Bruton said, referring to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. “This very agreement is used to promote U.S. beef exports in Asia, yet, at the start of 2008, EU exports of boneless beef under 30 months to the USA are still blocked — supposedly because of BSE. This is a double standard.

"We need to make more progress towards equivalence in the meat sector. Since a bilateral EU/U.S. Veterinary Agreement was signed some ten years ago, we’ve made incremental steps in the right direction but we need to move more quickly toward risk-based inspections and away from the costly blanket approach. It is hard to see why USDA inspectors will be spending more than 300 days between January and September inspecting European meat plants, including 40 days in Denmark, which is half the size of Maine. By contrast, in the spirit of our agreement, EU inspectors will spend only about 30 days in the U.S. during this period.

"The right of the U.S. to inspect is not in question but some consistency in approach and more focus on where the risks are coming from would be welcome. We have a world class food safety system in Europe and these regulatory barriers only serve to add cost and deprive American consumers of the access and choice to the wide range of high-quality European products. If we could find a way of trusting one another's respective systems, we could save precious resources. We need to let common sense prevail to the benefit of consumers on both sides of the Atlantic."