Mr President, we all know that the bovine spongiform encephalopathy crisis, the mad cow crisis, is yet another crime which has not been punished, and I doubt it ever will. But aside from this serious issue, it has left us with an institutional crisis, a market crisis, a drop in sales of beef products, a drop in prices and, most importantly, a consumer confidence crisis. The regulation under discussion has come too late, much too late in my opinion, but all the same it will help to provide some answers, some solutions and it will help us to take some action to restore consumer confidence. As you will recall, we fought a hard battle over this regulation last December in order to protect the rights of the European Parliament. We also fought a battle to push through the implementation of the measures laid down in this regulation as swiftly as possible. In short, we all know what we are talking about. On the basis of this regulation, very soon, this year, all bovine animals will, by law, have to be identified and monitored right up to slaughter. Meat from bovine animals will carry a label indicating the origin and history of the animals from which the meat is derived. During our analysis of this regulation, we tried to cater for a great many demands and a great many opinions. We wanted the provisions of the regulation to be kept as simple as possible so that they could be applied, and applied as quickly as possible. Let us not forget that the system we are going to implement is an extremely complex, extremely technical system, and concerns approximately 100 million animals throughout the EU. So we are talking about an extremely complex operation. The system therefore needs to be simple and practicable and it needs to be comprehensible to the consumer; this is of utmost importance to us. Above all, it must not contain exceptions or what we call loopholes, i.e. ways in which the regulation can be contravened either through complex wording or because of local or special exceptions or applications. I believe that we have managed to achieve this. The system that Parliament is endeavouring to establish though its amendments could be applied from 1 September 2000 onwards and we insist on this because one demand of the entire House was that specific dates and deadlines should be set at long last and that we should get started. I would just like to look at two amendments, two categories of amendments. First, your rapporteur is calling, with the greatest respect, for a report, a Commission proposal, within the year, on the application of this system to meat products. If we want to be taken seriously, we should also take account of consumer confidence in all meat products, of which, as we all know, there are a great many. And secondly, some amendments deal with how permits are to be granted to enterprises, operators and so on to apply the labels, to label the meat. The provisions recommended by the Commission are, to my mind, extremely minimal. The interested party submits an application and, after a period of time, the system which he wishes to apply is applied. I propose that we change this system. Anyone labelling meat must have explicit approval from the competent public authorities. This may seem a little more laborious, but we already have a laborious system and we must, at all costs, have state approval for meat labelling. If not, then I am afraid that the system will become too lax and may even become corrupt, and, as a result, we will not achieve our main goal of winning consumer confidence in the system.

Political group: GUE-NGL