Folias (PPE-DE), in writing. – (EL) General electronic tagging of sheep and goats is a modern system which will basically consist of permanently identifying each small animal so that they can be recognised, wherever they are, and their health can be monitored without any doubts. However, this sort of marking, without Community funding, will place a great financial burden on sheep and goat farmers.

Especially in Greece, where sheep and goat farming employs the farmer's whole family, day and night, 365 days a year, with no Christmas or Easter break and with an unacceptably low financial result in relation to the effort made and the capital invested, such an unreasonable and unfair financial burden would force numerous farmers to abandon their work and the countryside and would tragically reduce the animal stock.

At the same time, handicrafts which only make cheese from ewe's and goat's milk would close, with the result that unemployed cheese-makers would join the unemployed farmers, reducing the production of unique Greek cheeses based on ewe's and goat's milk such as feta.

Bold Community funding is more than needed in order to avoid all this.

At the same time, however, the general introduction of electronic tagging of sheep and goats by 1 July 2006 is considered very rushed for Greece, where there are more sheep and goats than in the other fourteen Member States together, which is why this deadline should be extended by at least a year.