Mr President, we have said in this House time and again since the BSE crisis that feedingstuffs are one of the first and most important factors in safe food production and in consumer health and protection. We therefore welcome the Commission’s proposal on additives in feedingstuffs. The Committee on behalf of which I am speaking, namely the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection, decided in December, on the assumption that the chairman of the Committee on Agriculture would draft such a good report, that we could waive our opinion. Nevertheless, I should like to say a few words on the report and express a view on a number of points. First, perhaps, I should say something on the question of the legal base. Even if we have new Rules of Procedure in Parliament, and it may well be that, with such an ambitious chairman in the Committee on Agriculture, problems of legislative competence will arise more and more frequently between the Committee on Agriculture and the Committee on the Environment, one thing is always crystal clear for me in this sort of conflict: cohesion in this Parliament is crucial and the legal basis of a question is crucial as far as I am concerned. Therefore, and I must address this comment to you Mr Byrne, I reject your choice of legal basis. If it is merely a hand-me-down legal basis taken over from previous directives, then it is a mistake to keep it. The Treaty of Amsterdam states quite clearly that, where people’s health is concerned, Article 152 is the correct legal base, and may I say to our own Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market that it is simply not good enough to look at the Commission’s proposal and say, there is nothing in it about health and consumer protection, so it has nothing to do with health and consumer protection. My group, as Mr Kindermann has already said, will therefore vote tomorrow to change the legal base and I hope that other groups in this House will do likewise. Mr Byrne, I ask you to accept and agree to the change of legal basis for the sake of transparency and good cooperation. If we do not change it and we follow the Legal Affairs Committee, we shall be opening the floodgates to manipulation. The Commission would be able to determine the choice of legal basis by excluding any reference to health policy and we would suddenly find ourselves up against an Article 37. Allow me to comment briefly on two other points. First, genetically modified micro-organisms in feedingstuffs. We cannot just refer to vertical legislation and say that at some point we will need another law. We do not have another law at the moment, and until we do, we must deal with genetically-modified micro-organisms as and when we pass legislation; we must include them as an add-on and insist that they be labelled. The rapporteur has done just that and that is a good sign. I say now, as I have said on numerous occasions in the past: yes, I too would like the Commission to propose a positive list which we can then debate and deal with in this House, but we do at least need a starting point for a positive list of additives in feedingstuffs. It is equally important to have strict hygiene requirements for the manufacture of additives and for proper controls to be carried out in the Member States. There are serious shortcomings in both areas and we have a great deal of work to do yet.

Political group: PSE