Adoption of EU Guidelines for the distinction between feed materials and feed additives
The European Commission and the Member States adopted the final text of the guidelines for the distinction between feed materials, feed additives, biocidal products and veterinary medicinal products. FEFANA (EU Association of Specialty Feed Ingredients and their Mixtures) said it warmly welcomes the decision taken by the EC, which provides to companies and authorities a proper tool to classify their products in a transparent and predictable manner.
On a daily basis, feed business operators are faced with questions related to the regulatory status and requirements of products which they are putting or intend to put on the EU market. Depending on the legal categorization of a product, it will have to meet different regulatory requirements, e.g. the need for pre-market approval or not, labeling constraints, etc. Although the current set of definitions in the European feed regulatory framework is clear and comprehensive, the interpretation of different categories is sometimes ambiguous and can lead to uncertainties for operators as well as for control authorities.
The EU legislation puts the basic responsibility to properly classify a feed product into one or another category on each feed business operators. This choice and the resulting legal obligations are then controlled by the local competent authority in charge of official control at the national level. It is pivotal for each operator to make the right choice in order to avoid any market disruption. FEFANA deemed it critical to provide operators with a transparent tool allowing right decision-making.
FEFANA has been consistently calling for the establishment of such guidelines for the distinction between different types of feed (e.g. feed additives vs. feed materials), which should create the necessary transparency in order to manage product classification in a fair and predictable way. This call was acknowledged by the EC which has recently adopted these guidelines after several months of work on this key project (foreseen under Article 7.1 of Regulation (EC) No 767/2009 on the placing on the market and use of feed).
The guidelines will help in allocating the proper regulatory classification status to any feed material, feed additive, biocide or veterinary drug. Furthermore, these guidelines will not only be helpful for operators but also for the authorities to ensure a consistent regulatory management of such products on the market.
FEFANA said it is grateful that the Commission took the decision of adopting such guidelines which should contribute to the enhancement of the transparency on the EU market. The guidelines will be published in the Official Journal of the EU shortly.
