Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I will start by asking you to excuse my voice, which is affected by a cold. This report finds us again debating the extent to which food is irradiated in the Community and the ways in which this should be regulated. The end of the 1990s saw the adoption of a directive, after lengthy debate, which allows only dried aromatic herbs and spices to be irradiated in the EU. The EU is now, again, faced with the decision as to whether only herbs and spices should continue to be permitted to be irradiated, whether this list should be extended to include a few foods with problematic hygiene conditions, such as frogs' legs and prawns, or whether the list should include foods permitted to be irradiated by the transitional arrangements in the individual states, such as potatoes, poultry, vegetables, prawns, shellfish, frogs' legs or protein. The Commission – as the Commissioner has just made clear – lists these three options in its communication and thus more or less leaves it to us in Parliament to decide which of them to approve. In its report, the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy has in fact come to a contradictory decision on the subject, which, I believe, the Commissioner has briefly addressed. On the one hand, the demand is made in item 3 that we should take note of the Commission proposal and regard the present list as complete, and the view is expressed that further herbs, spices and seasonings derived from plants should be allowed to be irradiated in the EU only if this is scientifically recognised as being harmless and efficient. At the same time, in item 4, the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy proposes that irradiated products, which are numerous in some Member States, should be added to the positive list in so far as this technology can make certain foodstuffs safer. What this actually does is to make clear our lack of an unambiguous position, as, on the one hand, we state in item 3 that we want a very restrictive decision, whilst, contrariwise, in item 4 making it clear that we favour a decision that goes further. Parliament, though, is quite clear about its position, expressed in item 5 of the report, which is that each foodstuff must be subjected to detailed analysis before any proposal is submitted to add it to the positive list, the object being to demonstrate that each of the conditions for authorising food irradiation have been met in accordance with Annex I of the 1999 directive. The Commission communication makes clear, and the Commissioner has just said equally clearly, that there is in fact no consumer demand for food irradiation, that indeed the greater part of the food industry rejects it and declares it to be superfluous. Even Eurotoc, an independent association of consumers promoting healthy eating – with whose chefs we are all familiar – has made it clear that the irradiation of food is incompatible with its conception of its own purpose and gained, within only a few days, quite enormous approval for its resolution rejecting food irradiation. I think this makes it clear that the directive on irradiation deserves to be strongly criticised and its presuppositions refuted. There is one thing that we must be clear in our own minds about, and that is that irradiation only makes any sense if it is used to conceal and draw a veil over hygiene conditions that are unacceptable to our way of thinking and are perhaps simulating for the benefit of consumers a quality which is in fact absent. Only then does it make sense to treat food with radiation, as, if hygiene conditions were good, there could be no misgivings about the products and they would not need to be irradiated. My second point is that irradiation is principally about keeping foodstuffs fresh throughout long journeys. Prawns are a prime example of this, in that they are taken from northern Germany to Morocco to be peeled. That too – as we have heard from the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism – should of course be seen in a very critical light in terms of an environmentally sound transport policy, and our committee has often called for the mainstreaming of environmental policy. I cannot, by way of conclusion, do other than to reiterate that in items 3 and 5 the committee has adopted very divergent positions, and tomorrow's vote will show whether we will take our stand on the side of consumers and of consumer protection, or whether we will make concessions to the industry, which has engaged in energetic lobbying over recent weeks. I believe that we should all be aware that irradiation should be viewed in a highly critical light, that it can also involve certain risks, not all of which we may at present be aware, and that consumers reject it. I hope that our decision tomorrow will be in favour of consumer protection, enabling the Commission and the Council to get on with their work, that we will also somewhat clarify the Committee on the Environment's rather contradictory report, and will be able to come up with an unambiguous position, one that will serve as a basis for further work by the Council and the Commission.

Political group: Verts-ALE