A Cautionary Tale
From Britain comes this story of an out-of-control bureaucracy and the murder of a small British cheese company. The Telegraph reports that bureaucrats from the European Union used every dirty trick they could muster to kill the company, Bowland Dairies and ban it from selling cheese.
John Wright had built up Bowland Dairies in Nelson into an £8-million-a-year business making curd cheese, mostly exported to five EU countries, including France and Germany, for use in quiches and flans. On June 12, inspectors of the European Commission's Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) visited the plant for 90 minutes, looked through the paperwork and, after misinterpreting one document, issued a "rapid alert notice" that its products were unsafe. The milk in the cheese, they claimed, broke EU rules on antibiotic residues.
On June 20, after thoroughly inspecting the plant, Britain's Food Standards Agency (FSA) strongly disagreed. It recommended one or two minor changes in procedure, and allowed production to resume.
On July 4 the commission repeated its claim that the milk did not comply with EU rules. The FSA responded that the FVO inspectors seemed to be confused over the type of milk the firm used. Telling the European Standing Committee on the Food Chain that "no evidence was found that contaminated milk was used", the FSA issued a notice to all EU member states that Bowland's cheese was entirely safe and fit for market. The commission appended its own negative comments to this notice, effectively maintaining the ban.
The company won - handily - in court, but the bureaucrats simply kept up the pressure and eventually forced Britain itself to either ban the sale of cheese by the company or face an investigation of the nation's entire cheese industry. In layman's terms, this is called "extortion". In the EU, this is apparently business as usual. Read the whole thing and then ponder for a moment on the drive to enforce nanny state regulations in this country. Is this really what we want for our future?
Business, World news | Gaius Monday, 11 December , 2006
