FUW slams threat of more animal transport rules

Farmers' Union of Wales president Gareth Vaughan today accused the European Commission of having an "appetite for expensive, unnecessary and impractical regulations" by proposing changes in animal transport rules within months of new regulations being implemented.

"As an organisation representing farming families with average incomes well below the national average, the FUW is acutely concerned by the Commission's general appetite for expensive, unnecessary, and impractical regulations," said Mr Vaughan in a letter to EC health and consumer commissioner Androulla Vassiliou.

He also emphasised that the EC was failing to make any significant attempts to ensure similar regulations are adopted in those Third World countries against which Welsh farmers compete.

"It is an alarming and unwelcome development considering that the current transport rules were only agreed in 2005 and have only just come into force," said Mr Vaughan.

Mr Vaughan also stressed that the development of such legislation goes against the Commission's own commitment to reduce EC bureaucracy.

"Average movement distances to slaughter have increased significantly in the UK as a result of the closure during the past 15 years of around 1,100 slaughterhouses (80 per cent of UK slaughterhouses)," Mr Vaughan added.

"These closures were largely the result of new regulations introduced by the Commission in the 1990s. We believe the 2005 regulations, and the current review, are driven in part by perceived problems resulting from the Commission's own failure to recognise the long-term consequences of its own actions in the 1990s."

Mr Vaughan particularly highlighted the Commission's failure to recognise the fact that pricing European farmers out of the market led to more animals being reared in countries where animal welfare standards fell below those required in Europe.

"While the Directorate General for Health and Consumers is consulting on the issue of animal transport regulations with the aspiration of improving animal welfare, the general view of the Commission - and particularly the Directorate General for Trade - has effectively been that it is desirable to export animal production to Third World countries, in spite of their lower animal welfare standards."

The recent Commission publication, Monitoring Agri-trade Policy (MAP), also indicates a likely fall in the EU's share of meat production over coming years.

"So while the Commission admits that there is likely to be a fall in EC production and an increase in Third World country production, and advocated WTO agreements that would have accelerated that trend, the Directorate General for Health and Consumers continues to enforce EC regulations that will also accelerate production in Third World countries with lower welfare standards.

"Unless the Commission gain and exercise powers that enforce genuine equivalence in those Third World countries against which we compete, the current and any future regulations will do nothing but exacerbate global animal welfare problems.

"We therefore believe that, in the interests of global animal welfare and European farmers, the revision of Regulation EC 1/2005 on the protection of animals during transport should be undertaken with a view to removing all unnecessary requirements, while suspending the remaining regulations until genuinely equivalent requirements have been implemented in those Third World countries with which we are in competition."