EU May Repeal Cumbersome Fruit and Vegetable Marketing Regulations

The EU has 34 regulations on marketing standards--from the allegedly essential to the patently absurd--for fruits and vegetables.

EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel proposes scrapping all but 10 of the regulations, arguing that they are needlessly cumbersome and bureaucratic,

She hopes representatives from the 27-nation bloc will vote to streamline the regulations at a meeting this month.

"We don't need 34 regulations to decide how round an artichoke should be or how thin a cucumber can be," said Boel's spokesman, Michael Mann, noting that such rules give the EU its reputation as an out-of-control bureaucracy.

But Fischer Boel has a fight on her hands, European officials say, because as many as 19 E.U. countries apparently oppose the simplification scheme. A note to the European Commission from the Spanish and Italian delegations, backed by France and Hungary, argued that "marketing standards play an important role in facilitating and ensuring transparency in market operations while protecting customers at the same time."

Consider EU "Regulation (EEC) No 2213/83 of 28 July 1983 laying down quality standards for onions and witloof chicory." You would think that the 10 pages of standards and the 19 amendments and corrections made in the 25 years since the regulation's enactment would leave little doubt about the required size, shape and color of an onion, and the amount of peeling, bruising, staining, cracking, root tufting and sprouting that is permissible. You would be wrong.

In January 2007, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture issued a report in which it took 29 pages to explain "quality standards for onions," complete with 43 photographs.