The Committee on Agriculture
and Rural Development adopted the report by Friedrich-Wilhelm GRAEFE ZU
BARINGDORF (Greens/EFA, DE) amending, under the codecision procedure, the
proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council
concerning meat and livestock statistics.
The proposed amendments are of
a technical nature and correspond (with a small number of exceptions) to the
wording drawn up by the Council working party and forwarded by the Portuguese
presidency on 28 December 2007, in order to enable a first reading agreement
to be reached. The amendments are as follows:
- some of the provisions,
previously set out in the annexes, are clarified in the legislative text
(in particular the definitions in Article 2 and the quality assessment
in Article 17);
- from now on, Member States
will have more room for manoeuvre in making use of administrative data
rather than statistical surveys: in the case of use of administrative
sources, Member States shall inform the Commission in advance about
methods used and the quality of data. In the case of sources other than
surveys, Member States will ensure this information is of at least equal
quality to information obtained from statistical surveys;
- qualification as regards
regional surveys: in order to limit the burden on Member States, the
regional data requirements should not exceed the requirements under
previous legislation. These requirements are optional for territorial
units having less than 150 000 pigs, 75 000 bovine animals, 100 000
sheep and 25 000 goats if these territorial units summed up together
contribute with 5% or less to the national population of the relevant
species;
- limitations and clarification
as regards forecasts for bovine animals and pigs;
- in order to ensure a smooth
transition from the regime applicable under Directives 93/23/EEC,
93/24/EEC and 93/25/EEC, the Regulation should allow a transitional
period of up to one year and, in the case of sheep, up to two years, to
be granted to Member States where the application of this Regulation to
their national statistical systems would require major adaptations and
would be likely to cause significant practical problems;
- MEPS ask that the regulatory
procedure with scrutiny be applied to all comitology provisions,
including the provisions on quality reports, the granting of
transitional periods to Member States and the modifications of Annexes
I, II, IV and V;
- lastly, the terminology used
should be in line with the internationally agreed zoological
nomenclature.