ABSENT POLITICIANS BLOW BIOTECH
VOTE
Ostensibly, Italian politicians are very
much pro-Europe, and vocally so. However,
most of them do not follow European issues
very closely, and some decisions made in
Brussels and Strasbourg take everyone by
surprise. Italian politicians from left to
right claim to be strong supporters of food
quality and safety. But they are
absent-minded, and often altogether
absent.
Take the cocoa butter vote in March of
this year: as a result, even chocolate made
with inferior vegetable oils rather than
with cocoa butter is entitled to call
itself chocolate. The result is a
lower-quality product, more profit for big
companies, and a disaster for
cocoa-exporting developing countries. This
decision was taken with the approval of a
number of progressive Italian MEPs,
including the leader of the Democratic Left
who a few days earlier had exposed his
bleeding heart on television regarding the
plight of poor African countries. When
asked why he had voted "yes" on the cocoa
question, he had to admit that at the
moment of the vote he was distracted...
But something even worse happened on
April 12th, when MEPs voted on Directive
90/220 regarding GMOs. Despite the intense
lobbying done by European FoE groups in the
weeks preceding the vote, three key
amendments that we were supporting were
rejected. There were large majorities in
favour of our amendments (see article this
issue), but we were some thirty votes short
of the necessary absolute majority.
It turned out that of the 87 Italian
MEPs, only 23 were present in Strasbourg
that day. The majority of these few that
were present voted in favour of "our"
amendments, no matter what their party
affiliation. Thus it is not rash to say
that if all of the Italian MEPs had been
present and doing the job for which they
are paid and with which Italian citizens
have entrusted them, the outcome of this
critical vote could have been very
different.
Laura Radiconcini,
FoE Italy
