EU looks set to lift the ban on use of PAPs in pig and poultry feed

08-Apr-2021 - Last updated on 08-Apr-2021 at 13:39 GMT

EU industry experts believe a proposal that would allow the feeding of processed animal proteins (PAP) from poultry to pigs and pig PAPs to poultry again has a good chance of gaining approval this week, under a EU Commission committee voting procedure, prior to validation in the EU parliament.

The vote is made in writing rather than at committee. National government experts were scheduled to have received their ballot paper yesterday, and all countries have to cast their vote by Friday evening, April 9, 2021.

In the meeting of the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed (SCoPAFF) in December last year, the EU Commission presented a draft Commission Regulation amending Annex IV to Regulation (EC) No 999/2001 - also known as the BSE regulation - that would reauthorize the feeding of PAP from poultry to pigs and pig PAPs to poultry.

A USDA report found that, as a large majority of the EU-27 countries received the proposal positively, there is a high expectation the reauthorization will go through.

“While the European Parliament, under the scrutiny procedure, must also vote on the proposal, it is not expected to block it as it will give the EU feed sector access again to an important source of high-quality protein, while at the same time recycling large amounts of animal waste, which fits well with the goals of the EU Farm To Fork Strategy,” noted the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) review.

Background

In response to the European BSE crisis, the Commission adopted Regulation (EC) No 999/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001, laying down rules for the prevention, control, and eradication of certain transmissible spongiform encephalopathies - the BSE regulation.

Article 7, as detailed in Annex IV, installed a ban on the use of PAPs and meat and bone meal (MBM) in feed for farmed animals. In the EU, PAP is defined as originating from category 3 material only, while MBM refers to products originating from the more dangerous categories 1 and 2 as defined in the BSE regulation.

At the beginning of the BSE crisis, in 1994, the EU introduced a ban on feeding mammalian PAPs and MBM to ruminants.

In 2010, the Commission published a TSE roadmap with the aim of gradually loosening the feed ban for aquaculture, poultry, and pigs. In 2013, the feeding of PAPs from pigs and poultry was reauthorized for aquaculture, but despite several attempts the use of PAPs from poultry for pigs and the use of PAPs from pigs for poultry never gained the necessary political support, despite the continued ban on same-species PAPs, writes the USDA authors.

The reauthorization of the use of PAPs for feeding to ruminants or the use of PAPs from ruminants is not yet being discussed.

In September 2020 the Commission said it was committed to continuing the discussion with member states’ experts, with a view to eventually “authorizing the feeding of non-ruminant farmed animals with insect PAP, and to reauthorize the feeding of poultry with pig PAP and the feeding of pigs with poultry PAP, without jeopardizing animal and public health with regard to BSE, and in compliance with the framework laid out in the European Parliament resolution of 6 July 2011.”