Le président du BEUC s'exprime sur la gestion de la politique des consommateurs par la Commission Barroso [en] 

Q: How do you appraise the European Food Safety Agency's mandate? Is it strong enough? 

A: I think that the BSE crisis shed light on the Commission being unable to handle this efficiently. First of all, inside the Commission there were not enough resources to look at that. I was involved at the time [of the BSE crisis] and when it all started, there was one person in the Commission staff who had to do everything. So there was a resource issue to be resolved. 

Then, of course, the Commission had a number of scientific committees which, you could say, worked quite well and efficiently and as I was active in environment, I often worked with these committees as they issued opinions on chemicals and GMOs. And I think they did a good work but obviously as it had to be filtered through the Commission, it became very difficult to see what was science and what was policy. 

Even if you were to do this in a proper way, there would always be a suspicion that this was a political view point and I think that somehow this imposed a large political cost on the institutions and created a lot of criticism towards the Commission, it threatened enormous economic interests and generated a feeling that people were not taking this seriously enough. I think actually this leads to the need to externalise as much as possible the whole scientific side so you can have a completely objective opinion. 

I also think that another dimension of it is the WTO arrangement where you can say that if the US suspects that whatever safeguard measures we take is somehow a political act, we will be attacked much more easily than if we have a pure scientific opinion in the way the Americans themselves operate - they have a tough separation between science and administration. 

So I think from that point of view, the new institution is a success. It responds to that problem, it provides a great independence of the institutions and the fact that it is no longer in Brussels but in Parma is contributing to that. It is important to ensure that this institution is well-staffed, well-resourced and independent enough. I think that controversies around this will arise once the new Parliament starts to ask questions. They will expect the institution to answer fairly quickly and they will reserve the right because of the resource issue to pick and choose the questions they want to look at. I actually think this is a wise approach but clearly they cannot allow themselves to become entangled in some kind of political debate because there will be a political drive to get certain issues dealt with now, especially if there is a crisis in one sector or another. 

It will be a great test for the institution whether it can maintain the right itself to choose and to defend this right and explain how they choose their subjects and that they have enough capacity to deal with the things which are important, perhaps even be a bit ahead of political needs. 

For instance, last Friday there was a BSE in goats crisis and the Council is now going to adopt measures in relation to goats. Clearly the institute cannot intervene in that but hopefully they [EFSA] will be involved now to redirect the temporary measures. So the system is more tuned now to respond to this kind of case. 

However, there are a number of other consumer issues now that are a bit underfocused in our view because there is now a total focus on SANCO and the new institutions but what about, say competition, and other issues. 

Q: Staying with food safety - before enlargement, many questioned whether the new member states could get up to speed fast enough in this area. What is your assessment of the way the internal market works in this respect and could you comment on the ‘next round’ candidates, Romania and Bulgaria? 

A: I cannot really answer on how they are progressing. There are Commission reports which address that. We, as a consumer organisation, do not have any evidence that safety has not been handled properly. There has been so much attention around this problem that, I do not say there will not be any problems, but there are mechanisms and we can perhaps say that we were a bit too strict with these countries in terms of actually limiting their possibility to export things which were not a problem. But this is a temporary measure and I don’t think we should regret that and I also think that perhaps sometimes it pays off to be a bit too strict.

I can mostly speak about Denmark [Mr Kjeldahl is also President of the Danish Consumer Council] where we can see more and more imports from new member states. We think it will have a positive impact on prices downwards. We feel that trade as well as the authorities are very concerned that there should not be specific problems with it. Actually, as far as I can recall, the problems that we have now, with salmonella or food safety, are basically old member state problems, problems with French chicken, salmonella, pig meat, etc. I think it would be wrong to say the situation is worse there, I am not saying it is better, but I just think that at that level, the old member states cannot blame the new in the present situation. What I do not know about is what the situation is like in their home market because what cannot be exported will remain in their home markets. 

Q: Do you have observers from Bulgaria and Romania? 

A: You will be the first to know that today at a meeting we dealt with a request from a Romanian consumer organisation and their file was accepted - while some technical issues will still need to be resolved. So we expect that they will become associated members with no voting rights but they can participate in our annual assembly. As far as I can remember, we do not have a Bulgarian file in a major state. But we now have a file from Turkey which we are looking at. 

Q: The Barroso Commission is considered by many organisations as rather liberal and business-friendly. Do you think that consumer interests will be adequately represented in the Commission in the next five years? 

A: We would like to judge on actual progress. It is easy for politicians to say words. We have a general feeling that the Commission was strongly influenced by industry during the Santer Commission. But the Santer Commission had also quite green priorities and we had quite a 'green parliament' at that time. 

I think that with the Prodi Commission, industry gained much more influence in the Commission. We started to see industry become much more present in the SANCO context, they found out that they had to lobby SANCO. We met industrial people in all unexpected places. The lobbyists very efficiently integrated everywhere, I mean, they do a good work, you can say, from an industrial point of view. And they also had some famous examples in the Parliament where industry actually managed to swing Parliament majority, for instance, on passenger rights. And I think if you analyse the new Commission you will see that industry has made another step forward in the choice of portfolios and commissioners. So you can say that in that sense, from a consumer point of view, the challenge has become greater. 

On the other hand, consumer policy and SANCO has become more major as a policy. We did not get much more in the Treaty than was already there but we got a lot of discussion and awareness-raising about it. And even if you can say the institutions, both the Parliament and the Commission find that they need subjects which bring them closer to people and I think that consumer issues are such subjects. And that is why that in a certain sense, you can say that the Commission cannot survive politically. 

They need something which links them to citizens and I think the environmental issues for many years were that issue. This is less strong today, environment is less on the agenda than it used to be but I think that consumer issues becomes more and more, and even more so with the new members where there is a lot of people here who suddenly find that the new members should have a high level of consumer protection because if not, it will affect us, even individually. 

The Parliament is currently working on a report about the situation of consumer movements in Eastern Europe and I think there will be proposals - as early as April - being put forward for discussions. There is an initiative from DG Sanco to double the budget for consumers in the next financial perspective from 20 to 40 million. And I think people also matter here. We have a new Director General for Sanco, Madelin, who is taking a keen interest in the file and you can feel that there are new ideas coming into the system. We do not agree on all of them but there is quite a frank and good dialogue. 

So you see, I think industry has greater powers. The crisis in some of the big countries have necessarily put industry higher on the agenda but I also think that consumer policy is strong today and I think we will gradually see a more and more institutionalised way of dealing with consumer policy that makes it difficult to come around. But one point where I think we are too weak today, that is exactly the integration issue. It is very difficult for us to really get a good integration of consumer policy in the internal market DG, in the industry DG. You can see what will happen to REACH (proposal on the registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals) – very difficult. Something will happen but will that be enough, there are a lot of things to test and for us, BEUC, one of the agendas we will press in the next year is the integration issue. Because that has never really worked and I think we need to make that work better. 

We have been discussing the strategy, we do not have a finalised view. Where we could probably find a common way with the Commission is to try to institutionalise the reporting and assessment mechanism in the consumer field. So the institutions would actually be more or less forced to present a report on the situation of consumers. We realise that one way forward would be to have some formal obligation to collect information in a structured way on the situation of consumers in different member states and link that with the policy-making. How we should do it – we are not too sure today. But we also see that this is one of the ideas that Robert Madelin is pushing through at Sanco and I think this would be a natural thing to have a little bit more common language about the situation of consumers than we have today. 

BEUC is fulfilling that role today and I think it should fulfil that in the future but we probably need some more resources to collect good information from the member states as the internal market starts to reach more and more areas - e-trade, for instance, will also increase, or pharmaceuticals is another issue where as soon as people start to buy medicines [cross-border] there will be a need for a common level of protection. 

Q: On the nutritional and health claims directive, what is your assessment of the situation? Will an agreement be reached under the Luxembourg Presidency? 

A: I do not know. It is a very difficult file and our experience so far is that industry is doing whatever they can to wear out the proposals - not only European, but also American industry. MEPs are under heavy lobbying pressure in six committees that deal with the issue. We have good communication with some of them but I am also sure that there are committees which we do not control and I am also sure that industry will also lobby national representations enormously on this. So my intuitive feeling is that it will be difficult to resolve under the Luxembourg Presidency but I hope they will make some progress in the direction that we want. 

Q: In your view, is there a need for further clarification in the area of consumer/patient information? 

A: I think there is a need to look at the health sector from a consumer perspective. What we are seeing now is that public systems are becoming semi-private and as technology becomes more expensive you will have fewer centres in Europe for rare diseases, etc, so it may be more reasonable for Danes to [go to] Germany to heal some specific diseases. And often, seen from a consumer’s point of view, you do not really know what you are linking into. It is very unclear whether you should pay everything yourself, what your bill will look like. 

So there is a lot of uncertainty around it which probably hampers the efficiency of the health sector and limits the choice of the consumer. The whole logic of the health systems now is towards greater individualism, greater choice for the patient. But if you should exploit this as a consumer issue, well you need information but you also need complaint systems, you need transparency to know about your costs, how your health insurance deals with it, about transport, etc. I definitely think there is a need to create more clarity for the consumer to be sure what you are doing because if not, people will be in desperate situation and they will not ask ten thousand questions. They will just move ahead and suddenly find themselves ruined by useless treatment because they do not have the information. For example, they just heard that perhaps this hospital in Germany is better than the hospital they have next door, which they could have got for free next door. 

Q: Should companies be allowed to provide health information? 

A: When you look at these things you always want to ask the question - what are the interests in the company in doing that? And if the interest is selling one particular service we often have a problem. In general, I am very sceptical about these things because the consumers should rather talk to a professional doctor who is not paid by a company. Even doctors themselves have difficulties finding the right treatment and following the developments, so how should a sick consumer be able to do that? There is no way and you risk a lot of misleading. And since there is public money involved here, the government has an interest to make sure that you provide the most cost-effective treatment to people and not launch them into all kinds of expensive adventures with little chance of success. 

People should be made aware of which sources of information they can trust and which they cannot. It is a little bit like e-trade. As this market is maturing, people are going towards websites with good information. You cannot stop certain ‘unserious’ sites but there might be an effort to do to authorise certain websites and say, here you have information which lives up to certain quality criteria but in general, I do not think it should be provided by a company. I think it should be provided by the public authorities or an independent body that does not have an economic interest in what people are choosing. 

Q: What are your views about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)? 

A: My general feeling about CSR is that it has become extremely important and we are at a stage now that serious companies are aware of it. And some companies even do something about it, at least in the first line that they control. It can be their own production site or perhaps their immediate fournisseurs [suppliers]. But actually the system is based a lot on your trusting these companies to do it and there is very little investigation into whether the claims are right. We had a recent investigation in Denmark about toys, there was a Swedish one also, which showed that actually in eight out of 10 cases the working conditions were horrible although there were claims that they were not. I think that the consumers and serious companies have a common interest that you can actually verify these claims. 

So I think the next logical approach would be to make sure that you can verify these claims and that you have some kind of a control mechanism because obviously when we find things we have actually sent journalists to the field but it is extremely expensive to do so for consumer organisations and companies need themselves also to carry the cost of doing that as they have the advantage of selling the product. We can see that markets are reacting very strongly to this.  

I think there is a clear need to be able to verify and justify the claims so you get an easy way to sort out the false claims to ensure the trust in the good claims. Because if you undermine the system by a lot of false claims then consumers will simply give up and say, we cannot trust anything! And that will be a real pity for the good progress made so far. 

Q: What are your personal priorities for your two-year mandate? 

A: Integration is one of them, as I mentioned on the policy side. I will deal a lot with the internal arrangements of BEUC, such as the role of the president here. And we have to make sure that all the new member states get good and strong consumer organisations. I think for us, to be sure that we are the representative consumer organization as we have been up till today it requires that they are good organisations and that the new members are sufficiently strong also to lobby their local [national governments] to make their point of views locally [known]. 

So we do not have ten member states that have never heard about consumer affairs when they meet in the Council. It works both ways, we should lobby, as we have done, but we should also make sure that our members are able to efficiently work at home. Because otherwise it will affect our capacity to lobby. We cannot have a hole in Europe where there is no efficient consumer lobby because that will affect us all. We have a training programme in place. Normally we have not been an institution-building organisation – I am not sure we will be that either. But we need to have a lot of attention to be sure that these organisations work as efficiently as possible with BEUC. And I think that the report from the European Parliament this spring would help us achieve that. 

Thank you