Threat to French poultry

.French poultry are in the sights of the European Commission. Because of bird flu? No, it is the slaughterhouses that are singled out. According to inspectors from the European Food and Veterinary Office (FVO), they are insufficiently controlled. About twenty French veterinary inspectors (full-time equivalents) cover the activity of the 240 slaughterhouses, while European regulations provide for 120.
In the absence of a rapid updating of the workforce, Brussels could decide to ban the export of poultry throughout the European Union. A severe economic threat to the leading European poultry producer.

To avoid the sanction, the Ministry of Agriculture has started the fight to mobilize veterinary reinforcements. But “the veterinary services are now bloodless, explains Benoît Assémat, president of the union of veterinary public health inspectors (SNISPV). They no longer have sufficient room to redeploy staff ”. But beyond the economic problem, it is the management of food security risks that is in question. “It’s been ten years, explains the SNISPV chairman, that we sounded the alarm about the lack of official controls in slaughterhouses. It is a flaw in the health security system. “

Without requiring that a veterinarian be systematically posted in front of the slaughtered batches of poultry, the SNISPV considers that a minimum of information concerning the farms (incidents, drug treatments, etc.) should make it possible to adapt the surveillance procedures. “Otherwise, food security, he believes, is no longer guaranteed.”

Is France in the process of lowering its guard in terms of food safety? Food, veterinary pharmacy, animal welfare, the whole sector suffers from the lack of surveillance, according to Benoît Assémat. The sustainability of controls is today directly threatened in certain sectors, such as commercial catering and direct discounts to consumers, in other words the back kitchen? neighborhood establishments. In the midst of state reform, the need to increase the workforce is not heard.

“For five years, affirms the president of SNISPV, between two thirds and three quarters of the retiring personnel are not replaced any more. The health sector should represent an emerging mission and as such escape the general policy of reducing the number of civil servants ”. For an almost equivalent population, Italy employs twice as many personnel to carry out health checks and Spain a third more, with a smaller population. In addition, the organization of risk management is threatened.

From 2010, the veterinary services, which until now were directly attached to the central administration, will find themselves drowned in regional interministerial directorates. They will deal with issues of food security as well as the enforceable right to housing, women’s rights or issues relating to youth and sports … Will this organization make it possible to react quickly when farms are attacked by infectious agents? ? Benoît Assémat’s concern is all the more legitimate since the threat is very real: bovine spongiform encephalitis, foot-and-mouth disease, bluetongue …

The crises that have followed one another over the past ten years show that it is important to maintain a high level of food safety requirements. “75% of pathogens for humans find their origin in the animal kingdom”, remind the veterinarians. Faced with threats to public health, further aggravated by global warming and the globalization of trade, veterinary inspectors are calling for the creation of a new agency responsible for coordinating, particularly in slaughterhouses, the management of health risks.

Questions to Benoît Assémat,, president of the union of veterinary public health inspectors

No consistency in the bill

What are the missions of veterinary public health services?

Benoît Assémat They are quite numerous and little known. They can be synthesized in three axes. The first concerns the prevention and control of zoonoses. The second concerns the control of the safety of the food chain. The third groups together actions that prevent pollution from agro-food industries or factory farming. These are missions that are carried out on behalf of the Ministry of Ecology. .

What is the problem?
BA It is the management of health risks that is the problem. On the one hand, with the general review of public policies (RGPP), the organization of veterinary services in the departments will disappear. We are going to be diluted in very inter-ministerial directions which bring together heterogeneous missions that have no connection with food security. On the other hand, we should finally decompartmentalize the approach between problems linked to the animal world and those linked to plant health. In addition, the disappearance of the interministerial “health security” mission, which combines the actions of the Ministry of Health and that of Agriculture, illustrates the inability to sustain cooperation between these ministries.

Why claim that future regional health agencies do not deal with environmental health?
BA. The bill, being debated in Parliament, transfers responsibilities in environmental health to the ARS. These environmental health missions have a very close relationship with ours. This bill aims to separate us while we were grouped around the department prefect. We believe that this fragmentation is not in favor of a coherence of the whole problem.
Interview with MG