Reducing at half the grace period granted by EU - April 10 th, 2007
The Sanitary Authority will ruin all individual milk producers
Although the EU has granted Romania a 3 year transition period until the end of 2009, The National Sanitary Veterinary Authority (ANSVSA) announced that the companies operating in dairy industry will be allowed to process milk that is not conform with EU standards until June 30th , 2008. According to ANSVSA, after this date, the use of raw milk conform to EU standards is mandatory. The representatives of the milk processing plants are unsatisfied with the deadline imposed by ANSVSA.
"Since EU offers us a three-year transition period, I don't understand why ANSVSA wants to reduce at half this period during which the plants can process non-conform milk" says Valeriu Steriu, President of APRIL, adding that the authority imposes too strict rules, "harassing" the companies in the sector. Because only 15% of the milk in Romania is EU-conform, there will be a battle for the scarce milk that is on the market, which will become even more expensive. "We will rely more and more on imports. We already import milk from Hungary. At present the prices fro milk purchase from the farmers vary from 0.72 to 1.2 lei/litre, 1.2 lei being more than what we pay for the imported milk. Now we heard that ANSVSA wants to reduce the period for processing non-conform milk, which will lead to a higher increase of conform milk price", declared the representative of a milk plant in Transylvania.
Another impact of the period cut imposed by ANSVSA, will be the shutting down of small milk producers that at present survive from milk deliveries to factories respectively collecting centers. "We collect milk from more than 5.000 farmers. Some of them have 3-4 cows and practically live from this activity. Because their milk is not EU-conform, they will not be able to deliver milk for processing after June 2008. What will they do after this date? Probably, most of them will stop raising cows or will throw away the milk" says the same producer.
In return, the chiefs of ANSVSA state that all they do is to apply the European legislation. "The monitoring and evaluation by ANSVSA of the milk processing units and milk quality, have proved that conform milk is not enough to cover the necessary raw material for the processing plants, that are structurally and technologically according to EU requests" says ANSVSA. Recently, at least two processing plants, Covalact Sfantu Gheorghe and Tyrom Baraolt have lost their rights to export their products on the EU market, after the check-ups performed by sanitary-veterinary inspectors. The officials of ANSVSA say that the ground for this decision was the fact that ¾ of the milk samples took from the collecting centers were not even conform for the domestic market. Out of the 278 milk producers and processors, 96 obey the EU legislation, but only 17 can sell their products in EU, meaning they process conform milk. The milk production in Romania rises annually to 5.5 bil. liters, out of which only 1.2 bil. liters are processed in an industrialized system, a high percentage being sold directly in the markets, without being pasteurized. Starting April 2007, if they don't have a milk quota, the producers will not be able to sell milk.
Source: Gandul Newspaper - 10.04.2007 |
