Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Like Gary, I was interested in the value of seal products being imported to the EU and I had asked the European Commission in Brussels before we left and hadn't been able to get an answer to that. But one of your officials whom I spoke to yesterday gave me this paper this morning, which does give a breakdown. I'll give it back to you. Perhaps it would be more appropriate for you to answer the question than for me. It's certainly given here.
I think there's a question here of how you now get your message over to us. Well, that's part of the reason we asked that this particular issue be on the agenda here and partly why we want to go to the coastal areas that we're going to.
Perhaps it might be slightly helpful just to put on record the status of the declaration--where it is now, our role. A written declaration is, in effect, one of the tools we have as individual members or groups of members to promote whatever interests we might have, and if a majority of signatures is achieved, then it's over to the European Commission, which then is duty bound to respond. But I think I'm right in saying they're not necessarily duty bound to obey. Correct? So we now await the formal response of the European Commission.
I would suggest then that giving your views to the European Commission would be helpful before they give their formal response. Our position as members of the European Parliament is to reflect public opinion in our constituencies, and that's why, as I said earlier, I'm not the slightest surprised that we got a majority, because public opinion in our constituencies cannot accept this kind of thing. They just can't.
One of my questions is this. Is there nothing that can be done in terms of changing methods so that we don't have this kind of image being beamed around the world? As long as this can be circulated, it's a no-win, I would say, in terms of public understanding, apart from perhaps in our own coastal areas, where they do understand the economics of living off the natural resources of the sea and how, in the case of Scotland, there are many similar concerns from the point of view of our commercial fishing fleets.
We have had a number of questions suggested to us by various people, including the Grey Seal Conservation Society of Nova Scotia, based in Nova Scotia, who question the authenticity of the independent veterinary inspections that were mentioned. I just want you to amplify that you do in fact have veterinary inspection and approval and, in particular, respond to some significant allegations that a significant amount of skinning alive has been observed. Can you comment on that?
Also, very specifically, from the Nova Scotia organization, there are questions about potential food safety hazards in connection with the processing methods. The suggestion is that seals are processed under fish inspection protocols as opposed to meat, if you like, or mammalian meat, and the possibility that there may be certain infections carried by seals that could be passed to humans and into the food chain in the otherwise healthy products out of the seal.