49. Calls on the Commission, in light of the recent EHEC outbreak, to review its strategy for dealing with cross-border food safety and health threats, to strengthen the Union's scientific risk assessment capacities and to promote exchange of best practice, involving both Member States and professional bodies; urges the Commission to assess the functioning of the Early Warning and Response System and the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed with a view to address possible shortcomings; underlines as well the need to tackle speculation on food prices by a stronger regulation of commodities markets; stresses that food and agricultural commodity markets should only be accessible to commercial businesses which use derivative products to hedg ...[+++]e against unforeseeable events and that should be restricted to specialist traders and brokers who do not have a commercial interest in these markets;

In order to reinforce this message, it has employed many different specialists, inspectors, vets and officials, developing a complex institutional behemoth to guarantee European food quality.

We have a group of external expert advisers, and I'm going to name them for you: Dr. John Carsley, a public health expert, currently a medical officer of health with Vancouver Coastal Health in B.C., previously from Montreal, with a specific expertise in epidemiology; Dr. Walter Schlech from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, a listeria expert in the immunocompromised, and Dr. Schlech was involved in the first recorded event to identify listeria in food in the 1980s; Dr. Mansel Griffiths, a food-borne micro-organism expert from the University of Guelph, who is a director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, well known ...[+++]to industry as the industrial dairy chair in microbiology; Dr. Bruce Tompkin from Illinois, a microbiologist and practical expert in food safety, with a deep experience, a lot of practical experience, who has worked with some of the largest U.S. meat producers Swift, Beatrice, Armour, ConAgra and in this role he served as a plant hygiene expert; and last, Dr. Michael Doyle, a microbiologist from Georgia, who is now directly involved in the American peanut recall and the pistachio recall.

I have a great deal of sympathy for your call to promote organic food for children and school canteens, but want to have advice on this from specialists.

The points below, relating to the matters discussed above, summarise some avenues to explore to help foster discussion with and among all those active in the field and with civil society on Union action seeking to provide genuine value added in relation to the national policies on human genetics, which might even be put forward as a European model in the international context.

According to experts and specialists in child nutrition, milk is indeed essential to the proper intellectual and physical development of children, of all children.