The European Union should introduce a specific licence for meat traders to prevent frauds such as the one that duped Europeans across the bloc into eating horsemeat labelled as beef in processed dishes, French ministers said on Tuesday.
France was swept up in the scandal after an investigation identified a French meat-processing firm at the heart of a fraud discovered earlier this year that involved traders and abattoirs from Romania to the Netherlands.
"We need to better supervise traders' activities," French Food Minister Guillaume Garot said after a meeting with meat industry representatives, who adopted rules and tips to better detect frauds. "Food is not a commodity like any other."
The horsemeat scandal broke in January when horse DNA was found in frozen burgers sold in Irish and British supermarkets.
While most commodity traders, such as grain traders, are registered to their country's financial authority, meat traders act as middlemen between a range of interests from processors to slaughterhouses and other traders. No specific authority oversees their activities.
France also called on the EU to allow member states to help processed food makers to include the origin of meat in labels while waiting for an EU-wide policy.
An EU deal on labelling may be hard to reach as media attention is fading and consumers turn back to cheap low-quality food, Consumer Affairs Minister Benoit Hamon said.
"It is clear that when news is not so hot, rather mild, on issues of economic fraud, we feel that some member states' resolution wobbles somewhat, if not wanes totally," Hamon said.
He said Britain, where horsemeat was first found in lasagne, needed to commit more vigorously in reaching an EU deal.
The European executive aims to extend to other meats and processed foods a rule under which fresh and frozen beef must be labelled with the cattle's country of origin and slaughter, .
Hamon responded to an EU-wide testing campaign that showed France found more cases of illegal horsemeat in beef products than any other EU country, with more than one in every eight samples testing positive.
"It is maybe because in other EU countries they searched less than in France," Hamon said.
The European Commission proposed that countries carry out more unannounced inspections at food companies and impose tougher fines for labelling fraud earlier this month.
Member states should also create a network to coordinate anti-fraud actions, Garot said.
