Germans want tougher food labels

Sunday, February 6, 2011

"Consumers are less interested in where a piece of meat was packed, but want to know where the animal lived," said a dissatisfied Ilse Aigner, the German federal consumer protection minister, after the European Union initially passed a regulation that forms a new basis for new food labelling rules.

Aigner argued that the rules for meat, which covered a variety of criteria such as protein and carbohydrate content, fell "short of expectations." Aigner hopes the measures will be strengthened when they are debated by the European Parliament, which has already spoken in favour of country-of-origin labels on meat.

Meanwhile, European farmers have asked leaders to lift the ban on the use of non-ruminant animal protein in animal feed. The president of COPA, the European farmers union, argues that EU farm incomes already fell 12 per cent last year and the number of active producers is trending downward. BF