Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, about 20% of all Europeans regularly supplement their daily diets. In 1999, European consumers spent EUR 1 615 million on vitamins and minerals alone. Demand is rising constantly, because people’s living and eating habits have changed radically. Vitamins and minerals are involved in numerous biochemical processes in the human organism. It is crucial to people’s health and to their physical and mental capacity that they optimise their intake of these substances. I believe that the opportunity to enrich our daily food intake with additional vitamins and minerals is very valuable. When we speak here today of food supplements, we primarily mean vitamins and minerals that are marketed in the form of tablets, capsules and powders. The directive on food supplements is designed to harmonise the laws of the Member States. This will give manufacturers easier access to all markets, subjecting their production and marketing practices to a uniform set of conditions. The directive unequivocally assigns food supplements to the domain of foodstuffs. Food supplements are not medicinal products, nor can they serve as substitutes for medicinal products. Through their categorisation as foodstuffs, food supplements are subjected to all the provisions that apply to foodstuffs in the European Union, including the provisions of quality, hygiene and safety legislation. The consumer must be able to rely on the complete safety of all foodstuffs, particularly of substances such as vitamins and minerals, where stability levels sometimes differ between products. The new directive targets two specific areas: consumer safety and the completion of the single market in food supplements. The Council of Ministers has adopted Parliament’s key demands from the first reading. Parliament welcomes the fact that the Council took account of our position regarding the need to include more substances in the directive. The substances in question are already on the market but have not yet been evaluated by the competent scientific committee. These are to be included in the annex to the directive. In the common position, a period of 18 months has been set for the preparation and submission of a dossier. The Committee on the Environment has extended this 18-month period to 36 months in order to give small and medium-sized businesses in particular sufficient time to compile the relevant data on their products. The House now has two further amendments on the table – one for 24 and one for 30 months. I would personally argue for 30 months, because I believe that two and a half years should be enough time to prove the safety of a product that has been sold to consumers for years. I attach great importance to the principle that substances should be scientifically tested before they become the object of Community legislation. As far as doses, and hence optimum consumer care, are concerned, Parliament welcomes the system of maximum safe doses combined with the reference quantities per head of population. In other words, manufacturers’ dosage instructions must not be based on the limits of human tolerance. On the other hand, they need not be bound by the recommended daily allowances, which are normally set at very low levels. On this particular point, the directive manages to take account of both the wishes of consumers and the need to protect them. The common position has come up with a compromise here that I entirely support. For this reason we reject Amendment No 6 to Article 5 of the directive. With regard to product labelling, the directive provides for clear dosage recommendations. The substance of Amendment No 8 on greater transparency is already clearly covered by Articles 38 and 42 of Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 of 28 February 2002 establishing the European Food Safety Authority. For this reason the Group also rejects this amendment outright. For all the reasons I have outlined, I can have no truck whatsoever with the proposal to reject the common position that is made in Amendment No 7. Finally, a few words on the campaign which all Members of Parliament have been forced to endure in the last few weeks and months; this is a campaign through which a single producer and dealer of vitamin products has been pursuing interests of a purely economic nature. (Applause) The company behind this campaign is engaging in image-making at the expense of the sick. It is breeding anxiety among consumers and exploiting their distress for its own ends. I sympathise with all those people who have been taken in by the scaremongering and utterly specious arguments that have emanated from the company concerned. It is clearly not the case that we seek to prohibit vitamin therapies by means of this directive on food supplements or that we are trying to curtail access to natural treatment methods. What the directive does prohibit, and rightly so, is any attempt to mislead consumers by making exaggerated claims about the curative or preventive powers of vitamins and minerals. This directive gives consumers in Europe the support of a legal framework that attaches great value to product safety and responsible labelling without restricting the range of products on shop and supermarket shelves. In short, it is a legal regime that combines free circulation of goods with a high level of protection. After talks with many organisations – industrial associations as well as consumer associations – I am more convinced than ever that this directive points in the right direction. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE