Visegrad Group and other countries, Romania included, ask EU regulations to prevent double food standards

Friday, September 22, 2017 Share

EU regulations must eliminate double standards for food in the EU market, consider representatives of Visegrad group countries (V4 - Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia), and from Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Slovenia, participating in a meeting of ministers of agriculture from V4, MTI informs.

Sandor Fazekas, the Hungarian minister of agriculture, told the press that, due to efforts coordinated by V4 countries, even the head of the EUropean Commission admitted that the practice of producing foodstuff of different quality under the same label was a problem in Europe.

“This is unacceptable and consumers from Hungary or other Central and East European countries do not deserve to have less meat in their food than Western European consumers”, the Hungarian minister said.

V4 representatives and those from the four countries participating in the Visegrad meeting signed a joint declaration referring to EU directives on renewable energies and improving access to EU funds for research in the field of agriculture.

According to the present system, V4 countries do not benefit enough from the European Research Area (ERA), which needs change, considering that 35% of EU farmers are in V4 countries.

Following the research they made, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia and Slovakia announced the European Commission last year about double quality standards of products sold by some companies in the East, compared to the West.

For instance, a study coordinated by Czech European deputy Olga Sehnalova showed that about a third of products sold in the Czech Republic has inferior quality than similar ones sold by the same companies in Germany.