The Royal Decree that would approve the Statute of the State Agency for Public Health and that could go before the Council of Ministers next Tuesday has put the Spanish meat sector on edge. The first final provision of said document proposes the amendment of the basic structure of the Ministry of Health and establishes that the Directorate-General for Public Health and Health Equity, will develop "in collaboration with the autonomous communities, the functions of the Department in matters of official control of food-export establishments" [...] "to issue the health certificate in public health matters for products of non-animal origin intended for consumption or human use".
These lines have been enough to raise the suspicion that the Ministry of Health (in the hands of Sumar) wants to recover from Agriculture (with PSOE minister) health control at borders, after more than two years have been spent working on its unification.
Unification from 2024
The Order PJC/756/2024, of 22 July, established the distribution of the official controls at the border among the portfolios of Agriculture and Health, and assigned coordination and functional implementation to the former. In this way, a demand from many of the affected sectors was answered, including the meat industry, which was calling for a more efficient, agile, and coordinated model to reduce administrative duplication and simplify commercial procedures.
The unification has not been straightforward and to date it is still being implemented. Even so, last May Agriculture took credit for this new management system in the health control of products of animal and plant origin, assuring that the unification had increased pressure on inspection, the frequencies, therefore, also had grown in effectiveness. Specifically, according to what the minister Luis Planas said, in the first year since the unification, physical inspections had increased by 7.5%.
Theory versus practice
However, the benefits proposed by the regulations seem to have found their stumbling block in people, since this unification generated some tension and unease among the veterinarians of Foreign Health, who, it is assumed, would have to become part of the Ministry of Agriculture.
Thus, the theory set out by the Ministry of Planas that “the creation of multidisciplinary teams had made it possible to improve the efficiency of the control process” appears not to have been as harmonious in real life as is said on paper.
The meat industry
The meat sector, aware, not only of the benefits of integration but also of all these vicissitudes between the Sanidad and Agricultura administrations, has started running for cover and, after learning the text of the Royal Decree of the Statute of the State Agency for Public Health shows its concern about what it considers would be a step backward for the companies that export food.
“We are firmly against going back to the previous border control system. That would be an error, a regression, because it increases costs and slows down procedures for exporting companies,” says the general director of the Asociación Nacional de Industrias de la Carne de España (ANICE), Giuseppe Aloisio.
The meat industry is the most important subsector of the food industry since it accounts for 23% of its turnover and 4.5% of the total turnover of the Spanish industry. Likewise, exports occupy a privileged position, since meat, meat products, and their offal are second in the ranking of the most relevant agro-food exports, accounting for 13.5% of them.