EU Law Blog

We spent some time thinking about domestic rules which are designed to or in fact do make it harder for foreign products to compete with domestic products. This article from the BBC shows that it may in fact be quite difficult to identify the nationality of certain food products - in this case beer. Is Guinness Irish?:

Guinness.. is actually brewed in more than 50 countries worldwide.
Furthermore, Guinness is owned by global drinks giant Diageo, which is headquartered in London and listed on both the London and New York stock exchanges.

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The Guardian’s story on the UK media regulator’s (Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom) proposals about restricting the advertising of food to kids is here. The full report is available here. Here is an excerpt from the proposals:

The aim of the revised advertising standards would be to reduce the level of hildren’s emotional engagement with food and drink advertisements. In summary,
• food and drink advertisements must avoid anything likely to encourage poor nutritional habits or an unhealthy lifestyle in children;
• advertisements for food and drink must not advise or ask children to buy, or ask their parents to buy, the products. There must be no appearance of encouraging children to pester others to buy the products on their behalf;
• promotional offers (including collectables and giveaways) in food and drink advertisements must not be targeted at children under 10;
• food and drink advertisements must not encourage children to eat or drink the product only to obtain a promotional offer;
• celebrities must not be used in food and drink advertisements whose content is targeted directly at children under 10. This would prevent advertisers from drawing on the authority and trust that children might vest in these characters;
• licensed characters must not be used in food and drink advertisements whose content is targeted directly at children under 10. This would prevent advertisers from using licensed characters (e.g. film or cartoon characters) that might make it difficult for younger children to distinguish between programmes and advertising;
• advertisers would remain free to use brand characters (that is those solely associated with a particular brand) on the grounds that they do not carry the same authority as licensed characters;
• nutrition claims must be supported by sound scientific evidence, and must not give a misleading impression of the health benefits of the product as a whole;
• no nutritional or health claims may be targeted at pre-school children (under 5 years); and
• advertisements must not condone or encourage excessive consumption of any food or drink.
These provisions would apply also to sponsor credits. Government sponsored or endorsed healthy-eating campaigns would not be exempted from these rules.

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Story here.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation has developed a pandemic influenza draft protocol for rapid response and containment. The WHO says:

The world is now closer to another influenza pandemic than at any time since 1968, hen the last of the previous century’s three pandemics began. While influenza pandemics are infrequent events, they are rightly feared as they spread very rapidly to affect all countries and cause abrupt and significant increases in morbidity. Neither the timing nor the severity of the next pandemic can be predicted, but severe pandemics in the past have resulted in tens of millions of deaths. As the SARS experience clearly demonstrated, the first influenza pandemic of the 21st century could have significant economic and social consequences that go well beyond the absolute impact on health.

This document illustrates that strategies for dealing with some problems have to be implemented at the global, regional (supranational), national and subnational levels.

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Swans in Germany now have avian flu. The EU is to adopt precautionary measures as it has in relation to the other Member States so far affected.

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Bird flu is now in Italy, Greece, Bulgaria (not yet an EU Member State) and Slovenia and Turkey.

The EU Commission described the measures being taken as follows:

The measures being applied by Italy are, as for Greece, the establishment of a high risk area (a 3 km protection zone) around each of the outbreaks and a surrounding surveillance zone of 10 km. In the protection zone, poultry must be kept indoors, movement of poultry is banned except directly to the slaughterhouse and the dispatch of meat outside the zone is forbidden except where products have undergone the controls provided for in EU food controls legislation (i.e meat sourced from healthy animals in registered farms, subject to ante and post mortem checks by vets in the slaughterhouse). In both the protection zone and the surveillance zone, on-farm biosecurity measures must be strengthened, hunting of wild birds is banned and disease awareness of poultry owners and their families must be carried out.

But a proposal for a directive on combatting avian flu published in April 2005 does not seem to have been adopted yet.

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