New meat import regime will take effect by March

“The policy aimed at supporting the producers has no effect if it leads to higher prices for consumers,” Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy Valeriu Lazar said, commenting on the amendments introduced to the Government Decision No 1363 of November 29, 2006, Info-Prim Neo reports. The amendments contain measures for supervising the internal market and hindering the import of products of a poor quality. They say the authorizations will be issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry to economic entities according to the “first come, first served” principle and the “simultaneous examination” principle. The executive suggests reducing the term for issuing authorizations to five workdays and the number of documents needed to obtain authorizations. The authorizations will be issued for every batch of imported goods, weighing not more than 20 tonnes. They allow importing 100 tonnes simultaneously. The new meat import regime will come into force by March 2010. By then, there will be formulated the normative basis and commercial defense mechanisms that will enable to remove the import quotas on meat specified in the above-mentioned decision (1363). MP Iurie Muntean, who headed the Economy Ministry’s special commission that dealt with authorizations for meat imports while he had been Deputy Minister of Economy, said the exclusion of quotas will lead to larger volumes of contraband, will affect all the meat processing companies and will diminish the collections into the budget. “We will witness the same situation as three years ago, when only 20% of the meat imports were legal, while the rest were contraband.” According to Valeriu Lazar, the given arguments are not convincing. “In Moldova, we have the highest prices of food products in the region. The national producers must be supported, but not by increasing the price of meat by 50%. If we want to ensure the quality of the imported meat, we must not set quotas, but make the sanitary, veterinary and inspection services work. ”Pretending to protect the national producers, the previous authorities formulated a list that included 20-25 importing companies. Only these companies were allowed to import meat. The processors, for which the meat is the raw material and the prices of their finish products depend on the price of meat, were not in the list,” the Minister of Economy said. Valeriu Lazar also said that such corrupt schemes were used for other products as well, either imported or made in Moldova.