Byrne bites back at cries of food authority location ‘fix’

Date: 25/04/02

By Laurence Frost

FOOD safety chief David Byrne has defended himself against suggestions that he is using the recruitment process for the new European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to boost the case for keeping it in Brussels.

Byrne was responding to concerns raised by Finnish MEP Eija-Riitta Korhola, who demanded an assurance that 'advantage will not be taken of the delay' in getting an agreement between EU governments on the authority's location.

The Irish commissioner said recruitment publicity 'explicitly mentioned that the seat in Brussels is provisional, leaving no doubts for the candidates that a final decision on the seat of the authority has yet to be taken'.

Finland and Italy, whose long-running battle for the authority culminated in an acrimonious stalemate at December's Laeken summit, now share concerns that a Commission stitch-up could rob both Helsinki and Parma of victory.

These fears were discussed informally at a recent bilateral between Italian farm minister Giovanni Alemanno and his Finnish counterpart, Kalevi Hemila.

'There was a joint feeling that the Commission is only too happy with the situation,' said a Finnish official.

'That's why many were pushing so hard to get a decision last year.'

Helsinki came closest to winning the agency in Laeken, as it had done under the previous Swedish EU presidency. But the compromise package of agency decisions proposed by the Belgian presidency was abandoned amid heated exchanges, during which Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi allegedly claimed that the Finns 'don't even know what prosciutto is'.

The MEP who drafted the Parliament's influential report on the EFSA now believes the EU executive secretly welcomes the current disharmony, and is counting on the newly recruited staff to resist any agreement on a base outside of Brussels.

'They have, in a way I think, colluded with that,' said UK Socialist Phillip Whitehead.

'They never wanted the EFSA to go to Helsinki in the first place.'

Whitehead added: 'The Commission bureaucracy think of how their children will be educated and what they want to do with their weekends - and they don't want to go to Helsinki.'

But Byrne insisted the recruitment procedure would not be allowed to influence the choice of location, describing them as 'two independent, non-related procedures'.

Food safety Commissioner David Byrne has defended himself against suggestions that he is using the recruitment process for the new European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to boost the case for keeping it in Brussels.