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Individual cages banned
Following a report on the welfare of geese and ducks bred for
foie gras published in 1998, the Council of Europe drew up a recommendation
in 1999 aimed at banning the use of individual force-feeding cages.
In concrete terms this means that it will no longer be possible
to buy these cages as of December 31st 2003. By December 31st
2010 all such cages should be removed from all production centres.
Producers themselves have acknowledged that these cages, or so-called
force-feeding pens, account for over 87% of installations in France.
This led the Technical Institute for Aviculture (ITAVI) to declare
that, “The consequences of this ban will be financial penalties
and a deterioration in working conditions.”
Limits on spreading
Furthermore, other European directives limit spreading to 170kg
of nitrogen per hectare. This is deplored by the ITAVI, an organisation
uniting producers and the authorities, which claims that, “In
certain production areas, spreading surfaces are limited and it
can be very difficult to obtain permission to create or enlarge
a breeding or force-feeding station. Furthermore, these regulations
also require the presence of infrastructures for stocking and
collecting animal faeces. The costs incurred will lower producers’
profit margins and the competitiveness of their operations. There
are also environmental problems specific to the foie gras sector
(problems of olfactory pollution that are more marked than for
other types of animal production and the management of breeding
cycles).”
No pointless suffering
Another important point, directive 98/58/CE of July 20th 1998
requires that, “Member States make the necessary arrangements
to ensure that owners and operators take all appropriate measures
to guarantee the welfare of their animals and in order to ensure
that the aforementioned animals are not subjected to any pointless
pain, suffering or damage.” Now, as highlighted by the European
Commission, this text applies to all types of breeding, including
that of geese and ducks for force-feeding. It is even highlighted
in the annex that, “No animal should be fed or watered in
a manner that causes suffering or useless damage and its food
or ration of water should not contain any substance that is likely
to cause suffering or pointless damage.”
The future
For the moment the impact of the directive is limited by the fact
that States can still get around it, if their legislation allows
them to do so. However, some European countries are increasing
pressure for application of this text. The Commission has already
indicated that, “If it proves necessary, the Commission
will present adequate propositions to the Council with a view
to standardising implementation of these recommendations on a
Community level.” In other words, to ban the production
of foie gras in Europe.
Producers
begin to worry
This
is how the Technical Institute for Aviculture (an organisation
uniting producers and authorities) analyses the claims concerning
animal welfare, “The production of foie gras has not escaped
from the current debate over breeding systems, whose rationalisation
is often compared to the dangerous drift of industrialisation,
in a context that is heavily influenced by the ESB crisis. In
this new context, several types of disruptive events are possible,
especially a boycott or ban on the production of foie gras in
the name of animal suffering and of course, changes to regulations
regarding the maintenance of force-fed ducks, which raises the
eventual issue of segmentation of the offering according to the
way in which the ducks are kept.
And how does the organisation advocate informing consumers :
"A qualitative study has been carried out on two groups of
individuals that consume foie gras to assess the importance of
consumers’ current awareness of the ‘animal welfare’
issue in their product choices. This qualitative study made it
possible to put the importance of the animal welfare issue into
perspective as far as the image of foie gras and consumer behaviour
is concerned. It also made it possible to formulate a certain
number of hypotheses that may be able to explain strategic choices
made by breeders in the field of communication on animal welfare
issues."
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