Agriculture Bill, Third Reading.
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What makes you think the information wont be labels ?
Do you really think Lidl and Aldi will stop giving us what they have always given us for instance? Do you think Asda and Sainsburys are going to start passing off American chicken as home grown?
Do you remember the horse meat scandal, well it was unscrupulous meat produces, primarily in Europe who were behind this and the British introduced one of the worlds most sophisticated tracking / testing systems to combat such fraud.
So Timmy et al, have a little faith !!
I doubt the major supermarkets are going to move from their provenance of sourcing British and Irish produce for fresh meat – it would make no sense to break the trust and confidence of consumers for the sake of a savings.
Although what a ludicrous world we live in if it costs less to bring to the consumers meat that’s been pumped full of costly pharmaceuticals (anyone seen what they charge at the vets even over here), frozen and then travelled 3,000 miles+ then processed in disguise over here and packaged for the supermarkets. When you can just get meat from a national / local farm and have it distributed a far less distance.
I hope Lilly is right about the labelling, but with the way things are going, I can’t call it.
I suspect most of this stuff will end up in cheap restaurants, cafes, bars etc where it will simply be called ‘chicken’ or ‘beef’ – you don’t usually get extra information like on labels at those places.
It’s got to end up somewhere, hasn’t it?
Timmy, Trade negotiations are secret…that’s the nature of business! You really are a glass half empty chap aren’t you!
If “Trade negotiations are secret” how do people know they are secret and what is being and not being discussed?
Never-hard…. it might have something to do with standard business practice, most negotiations trade, financial, etc etc tend to be held behind closed doors quite legitimately for reasons of confidentiality and corporate sensitivity.
If in any doubt, pop along to your local bank for instance and ask the bank manager for copies of their ‘trade negotiations with other banks or financial institutions’. Im pretty sure they will show you the door.
If we were only talking about a certain type of trade negotiation where it might be considered important to eg protect trade secrets and not give anything away to competitors, then Lilly’s point wouldn’t be unreasonable.
The trouble is that we’re talking about secret trade negotiations in conjunction with the US’ stated intent to include chlorinated chicken, hormone treated beef etc in exports bound here. And we’re talking about them at the same time that good EU food labelling standards etc are being watered down. So everhard’s questions are fair enough.
If you type ‘US-UK trade negotiations secret’ into a search engine, things get worse. According to some results, the NHS is on the table. If that’s true, no wonder they wanted to keep it a secret. Why would documents exist that talked about the NHS being included in negotiations if there were never any intention to bargain over it?
I say the glass is half empty because the clues point that way.
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