Consumption only plans to submit to the Council of Ministers this year a royal decree to regulate the labeling in braille of certain relevant products
Moncloa cools the expectations of Alberto Garzon to limit the advertising of certain foods aimed at minors. It was the great project for the election year of the Minister of Consumption, absent in the battle against the increase in supermarket prices that his colleagues from United We Can, the vice president Yolanda Diaz and the Minister of Social Rights, Ione Herb.
In the 2023 Annual Regulatory Plan, which is the document that includes the legislative initiatives that the different ministerial departments plan to submit to the Council of Ministers for approval during the year, there is no trace of this proposal.
In fact, Garzón’s department has only proposed one initiative for this year to the Ministry of the Presidency, which is where the entire plan has been coordinated. It is a royal decree to regulate the braille labeling of certain products and it consists, in fact, in the development of an additional provision of the law for the protection of consumers in situations of social and economic vulnerability.
In the 2022 Annual Regulatory Plan, the “Royal Decree for the regulation and control of advertising of foods and beverages with a high fat, sugar and salt content aimed at children” appeared for the first time, with the aim of “establishing regulations regarding food and beverage advertising aimed at minors” to “protect their rights and reduce exposure to advertising” of certain foods, “thus contributing to the reduction of childhood obesity rates and guaranteeing the right to health of girls and children”.
Among other measures, the norm designed by the Ministry of Consumption introduced some prohibitions on the advertising of certain unhealthy foods aimed at children and adolescents, such as appearance of influencers in ads or promotions such as gifts or raffles aimed at supporting this advertising. Likewise, it contemplated a series of conditions for the issuance of commercial communications on this type of food in the media and a sanctioning regime with fines of up to 600,000 euros.
Garzón had prepared the project since 2021 -the Ministry launched the public consultation at the end of that year- but did not send the draft to the National Commission for Markets and Competition for evaluation until the summer of 2022. And at the end of September came face to face with a unfavorable report in which the CNMC reminded him “of the legal obligation to exhaust self-regulation and co-regulation options before limiting commercial communication.”
In its evaluation, the regulatory body urged the Ministry to “strengthen the specification of the standard” to guarantee legal certainty to the operators, to “take into account the powers of the regional audiovisual regulatory authorities”, to “strengthen the justification” for which it is prohibited to advertise certain foods, to review the sanctioning regime and to “assess the moment” to adopt the standard and “the effects that successive changes could have for the affected companies and consumers”, in reference to the open debate within the European Union on nutritional labeling.
Rejection of Planas and Calviño
The setback of Competition, together with the rejection of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which directs Luis Planasas well as the Department of Economic Affairs, led by the vice president Nadia CalvinoThey knocked down Garzón’s project, according to sources familiar with the intricacies of government conversations who interpret that the problems generated by the draft have motivated the disappearance of the Regulatory Plan initiative.
From the Ministry of Consumption, however, they defend that the initiative is still on the table, that work continues on it, improving aspects, and that the intention is to take it to the Council of Ministers. In fact, at the beginning of last January, in a meeting with the High Commissioner against Child Poverty, Garzón insisted on the urgency of regulating the advertising of food and beverages aimed at minors in order to reduce the rate of childhood obesity by 25% in Spain.
Although the Consumption section of the Annual Regulatory Plan only includes the initiative to regulate the braille labeling of certain products, the Ministry has several pending tasks in 2023 derived from legislative processes already initiated, such as those related to food waste, the quality of canned vegetables, the promotion of healthy eating in educational centers or the technological aids used in the processes of preparing and obtaining food for human consumption.
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