Adopting the report by Mr VAZQUEZ FOUZ, the European Parliament approved the directive presented by the Commission introducing framework Community regulations for official inspections on animal nutrition, covering all products and substances which may be used in animal nutrition. This directive is based on principles of equivalent, consistent and proportional inspections. Parliament welcomed the directive but proposed replacing the term "physical inspections" by "quality inspections". It also stressed the need to harmonise methods of analysis within the Member States as, otherwise, animal nutrition containing an unacceptable proportion of unwanted substances could be imported into certain Member States with less strict methods of analysis and then sold on the Community market.
The European Parliament called for Member States to ensure that the relevant authorities carried out documentary and identity checks when products were imported so as to check:
- the type of product,
- the origin of the product,
- the geographical destination of the product, in order to determine if it is a product in transit or a product actually being imported into the territory of the European Union.�