EU: Cow monitor does not meet legal requirements

This is mentioned in an audit report from the committee's DG Health and Food Safety following an inspection held at the end of last year. To repair this shortcoming, legal changes are needed to give veterinarians a truly independent status. It Cow monitor system, in which most Dutch dairy farmers participate, is nothing more than a private quality system for the EU and is not suitable for meeting legal obligations. That is a different conclusion than the dairy sector and also the supervisor COKZ held on last year.

In addition to Cow Monitor, a PPB+ system is now also being developed by Qlip, as an extension of the normal one PBB. Eko-Holland and Arla want to work with this system. Once this is on the market, there will formally be 'market forces' in quality control for raw milk, but it is not yet clear how the required independent supervision by veterinarians is guaranteed.

Understaffing has a debilitating effect
Apart from this, both the COKZ and the NVWA (Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority) are being criticized because they have too few staff available for the supervisory tasks they have to carry out in the dairy industry. This is a recurring objection from the European Commission, which was also pointed out in 2020 and 2018. Due to this staff shortage, far fewer checks are carried out than necessary and additional checks after an identified shortcoming require waiting far too long to check whether the problem has been resolved. The EU also has problems with the fact that the COKZ has not registered all dairy and dairy farms in its own database (Synergy). According to the European auditors, all these things undermine the effectiveness of supervision.