UN to help set the stories straight

Date: 05/10/1995

By Michael Mann

THE European Commission is looking to the United Nations to help it avoid a repeat of several recent embarrassing diplomatic incidents.

The Commission's saviour on this occasion will be the snappily-titled UN Economic Committee for Europe's Working Party on Perishable Product Standardisation and Quality Improvement.

One of the central pillars of the Commission's proposals for the reform of the EU's massively complex fruit and vegetable market, adopted this week, is the introduction of the UN ECE's minimum marketing standards.

So next time a mischievous national newspaper points the finger of mirth at 'Brussels', the Commission will be able to direct it towards an even larger organisation based in New York.

Officials in DGVI, the Directorate-General for agriculture, hope that this will be the end of a series of damaging reports - mainly in the UK press - about the EU's attempts to ban “abnormally curved” bananas, “square” strawberries and “excessively curved” cucumbers.

The description of the tomato as “a uniformly coloured salad vegetable produced in conformity with current standardised regulations” caused much amusement in some sections of the press.

Whenever such problems arose, the Commission was quick to point out that the standards it required were simply the minimum demanded by international bodies all over the world and by traders throughout the Union. Final adoption of UN standards, an apparently obvious tactic, should set its defence in concrete.

It should also ease the workload of the so-called “Rapid Reply Unit”, established recently to provide a response to what a Commission official described as “press distortion” within of 24 hours of an erroneous report appearing. The Unit is staffed by a small group of officials within DGX, the Directorate General for information, providing justification for EU decisions which may appear strange to the European public. The Unit also worked closely with the Commissioners' Cabinets on a leaflet entitled “Do you believe everything you read in the papers?”

However, much of the damage limitation work remains the responsibility of the Spokeman's Service, according to Sir Leon Brittan's spokesman Peter Guilford. “A lot of the harm done by inaccurate reporting can be prevented when one of the spokesmen spots a report first thing in the morning,” he said. This was the case during the recent furore over “square strawberries”.

One newspaper reported the rejection of a consignment of Spanish strawberries by UK farm inspectors with the headline: “Euronuts ban fruit for being too square”. By lunchtime on the same day, the Spokesman's Service had dug out the relevant regulation and killed the story.

To strengthen its efforts to reduce damaging publicity, the Commission is also proposing to set up a special corps of EU inspectors to make sure that farmers actually adhere to the rules.

Given that much of the day-to-day running of the regime will be left to local co-operatives, the new 'Fruit Police', drawn from the Commission and the member states, will have plenty to do.