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Final report of an audit of Belgium from 12 october 2020 to 16 october 2020 in order to evaluate controls of animal welfare at slaughter and during related operations

By May 27th, 2021June 15th, 2021No Comments

Document type : Audit report n°2020-6965 from the European Commission's DG SANTE

Authors: DG SANTE

Preview: This report describes the outcome of a remote audit of Belgium carried out from 12 to 16 October 2020. The main objective of the audit was to evaluate the effectiveness of official controls on business operators in order to ensure that animals are spared any avoidable pain, distress, or suffering during their killing and related operations. The audit also assessed the actions taken in response to the recommendations made in the previous audit report DG(SANTE) 2014-7059.

The report concludes that there has been limited progress since the previous audit carried out in November 2014. The regional authorities Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels-Capital) have taken the legal responsibility for animal welfare from January 2015.

The 2018-2020 multi-annual national control plan does not contain objectives for animal welfare in the three regions. This, together with the absence of information from the regional competent authorities to theprogress report, makes it impossible to assess whether the competent authorities are directing their efforts effectively or efficiently.

Although responsibilities are well defined, there isn't good cooperation and coordination between thefederal and regional competent authorities. This creates gaps and overlaps in the controls and decreases the efficiency and effectiveness of the official controls on animal welfare at slaughter.

There is good progress regarding the enforcement of the minimum electrical parameters for waterbath stunning and the requirements for new stunning equipment. The competent authorities took measures which led to proper implementation of EU requirements in these areas.

The measures that the competent authorities took to ensure compliance with structural requirements after the transitional period triggered improvements in slaughterhouses, but they were insufficient to ensure full compliance.

The use of video surveillance provides the Brussels-Capital regional competent authority with an additional useful tool for monitoring of animal welfare and for enforcement activities. As currently the officials have to review the images from the slaughterhouse, the tool is not yet fully useful to control remotely.

The regional competent authorities have not yet addressed four recommendations made in the previous audit report DG(SANTE) 2014-7059. Flemish and Walloon competent authorities do not take into account the previous inspection results in order to establish the frequency of their checks. Wallonia has not yet published the necessary legislation to approve the training programme. The competent authorities have not yet put in place a system for monitoring in the slaughterhouses the animal welfare of broilers in the farm, the insufficient monitoring of welfare indicators in poultry slaughterhouses, together with the absence of data on daily mortality rates, does not allow the authorities to intervene to improve the welfare at the farms of origin. There has been little progress on setting up a system to monitor compliance in broiler farms with increased stocking density, this creates the potential risk that broilers are kept at stocking densities under which the housing and management conditions are insufficient to ensure their welfare.

The report makes a number of recommendations to the competent authorities to address the shortcomings noted.

You can find the response of the competent authorities here

European Commission website - DG HEALTH page
From the DG SANTE website