Monitor: European press comment on the current dioxin food scare in Belgium

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SERIOUS ACCUSATIONS have been made in this chicken and pork affair. The chain of responsibility has to be determined. The most probable explanation, alas, is that this affair was the result of a series of flawed judgements and small, successive malfunctions. The ministers seem to have seriously misjudged the gravity of the problem, being overly preoccupied with their electoral campaigns. And Dehaene, after covering for his ministers initially, realised a little too late that the crisis was a serious one. It was then that he implemented his own solution without bothering to take the advice of his Francophone partners. These malfunctions are too typical in Belgium.The contents of our plates, like the content of the air we breathe, has to become a priority for a state expected to find for itself an efficient role and dependable practice. And that's before we even begin to count the exorbitant cost to the agriculture sector of such blunders.

Le Soir, Belgium

ENOUGH! EUROPE and food scandals - a long and inglorious chapter in the history of the free market. This time it's dioxin, a mega-poison. How did it get there? Is there more? No one has a precise answer to these questions. Brussels has shown excessive zeal in regulating every kind of nonsense, from the size of apples to the curvature of bananas. Yet poisoned food and animal fodder are sloshing around Europe without hindrance. What a testimony to the incompetence of Brussels' creative regulators.

Bild Zeitung, Germany

ALL THE ingredients are assembled to make Chicken a la dioxine a serious European matter. We don't even know the extent of the contamination. Chicken a la dioxine comes under the same umbrella as uncertainties about Creutzfeldt Jakob disease - also linked to a worry about productivity pushed to the absolute maximum. Faced with this, the European governments have an urgent need for transparency. Without a certain degree of transparency they will incur unpleasant investigations and responsibilities.

Liberation, France