Anger at EU cage ban stance
A British Euro MP and free range egg producer has accused the European Commission of burying its head in the sand over the impending ban on conventional cages.
At a recent meeting of the European Parliament’s Agriculture and Rural Development Committee, UKIP MEP Stuart Agnew clashed with a European Commission representative over the ban on conventional laying cages that is due to come into force on January 1 2012.
He said that the egg industry believed that as much as 29 per cent of EU egg production would still be from cage birds when the ban came into force.
"The Commission is burying its head in the sand on this issue," he said after the meeting. "Its representative at the meeting, ironically an Englishman called Newman, was not prepared to speculate on what might happen if a significant number of hens are still in cages.
His line is ’it will be all right on the night’, despite the fact that financially, let alone logistically, the industry believes that 29 per cent of EU production will still be in cages on D-Day," he said "He was not prepared to discuss suggestions that battery cage eggs must not leave the country of production. He would only say that the Commission is constantly reminding member states of their obligations. No mention was made of any attempt by the Commission to either encourage or force them to comply with the ban," said Stuart Agnew, who has 22,000 free range layers on his farm near Fakenham.
"Once again, I championed the obvious solution of creating an extra number 4 classification to be used to identify colony produced eggs, but Mr Newman failed to answer because he believes that there will not be a need for it.
The potential disaster here is that English egg producers have invested heavily in the infrastructure needed to comply with the ban and, having met the deadline, will find themselves in unfair competition from suppliers outside of the EU or from member states who have not met the deadline but have been allowed extensions."
Mr Agnew said he made the Commission’s options very clear during the committee meeting: "You have no Plan B, so on January 1 2012 you will have to make a choice. Either you ban 29 per cent of production, which will be replaced by imported eggs from outside the EU, which of course will be produced in battery cages, or you give the non-compliant member states more time, resulting in eggs from different production systems being put on the market under the same label."
Mark Williams, chief executive of the British Egg Industry Council, has been warning for some time that a large part of the EU egg laying flock would fail to meet the 2012 deadline. He said at the BFREPA conference in December that it was estimated that half of the hens currently in conventional cages in Europe would not be converted by 2012.
He said that, in theory, 31 per cent of the EU’s hens would become illegal on January 1 2012. Last month Mark told the Ranger that revised estimates put the number of non-compliant hens at 29 per cent of EU production. That would appear to be the figure used by Stuart Agnew when confronting the European Commission representative.
The creation of a code to distinguish conventional cage eggs from those produced in enriched systems – the issue raised by Stuart Agnew with the Commission – is something that the UK egg industry has been pressing for should the EU allow some member states more time to comply with the ban on conventional cages. It also wants to see an intra-EU trade ban enforced to ensure that eggs produced in conventional cage systems are not allowed to compete with the eggs of producers who have invested in enriched colonies.
The industry has had the support of the UK Government in pressing for these measures. That support has been maintained despite the election of a new Government in May. Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman recently wrote to BFREPA to confirm the Government’s support for the UK egg industry’s position.
She said in her letter, "The Government remains entirely committed to the conventional cage ban coming into force on 1 January 2012, and to supporting industry during this transitional stage. The UK has asked the Commission to be ready to provide sufficient enforcement controls to protect UK producers and to ensure that those producers who have already made significant investment to comply with the legislation by converting out of conventional cages are not disadvantaged if other countries do not meet the 2012 deadline. If there was a delay to the ban, the aim would be to prohibit non-compliant eggs from entering the UK from another member state."
The EU has continued to insist that the ban will go ahead as planned on January 1 2012. Poland’s official request for the ban to be delayed for five years was rejected, but one European politician has since indicated that the EU could allow derogations for member states that fail to meet the deadline for the ban.
The politician who made the suggestion was Sabine Laruelle, the Belgian Minister for Small and Medium Enterprises, the Self-employed, Agriculture and Science Policy. She made her remarks at a meeting of the EU Agriculture Committee. She said that if there was ’real proof’ that some states had tried hard to implement the directive but because there were specific, objective reasons why it had been difficult to implement it completely, there might be room for three or four small derogations.
After hearing of Ms Laruelle’s remarks, Mark Williams told the Ranger, "It comes as no surprise, seeing as we have been telling the Commission there was going to be a problem for years." He said that her comments made some form of protection more important. "This makes it even more vital that those producers who have invested to comply with the date of the deadline for the ban on conventional cages are not commercially disadvantaged," he said.
