The Irish-based EU Food and Veterinary Office will play a pivotal role in the implementation of an early warning system on food safety which was agreed last night by EU farm ministers in Luxembourg.
The Ministers were meeting for the first time since the dioxin scandal in Belgium which led to the banning of Belgian food exports following contamination of food through animal feed.
The Ministers agreed proposals aimed at making animal feed safer and decided that official controls be set up in member-states to ensure that consumers are protected.
They agreed a comprehensive early-warning system, which is now obligatory for member-states.
Ministers were highly critical of their Belgian counterparts for the slowness in informing their own people and other member-states about the problems in Belgium.
The task of the Food and Veterinary Office will be to ensure that monitoring measures are carried out in accordance with uniform principles of control.
The council asked the Commission to monitor the uniform and effective implementation of EU early warning systems and, where appropriate, make proposals for improving them, as well as considering the extent to which current monitoring systems should be extended to cover the area of residues in food.
The Ministers did not adopt a proposal from the Dutch which was aimed at making food producers legally responsible for incidents such as the dioxin case.
There was agreement on the need for harmonisation of feeding stuff laws and the FVO will be asked to submit proposals on this. The Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, said the problems in Belgium highlighted the need for an effective and rapid response system to deal with food emergencies.