Freshfel defends EU school fruit scheme

The European Commission launched an evaluation of the EU school fruit scheme (SFS) in February 2015 with a focus on its relevance, subsidiarity, proportionality and simplification. Freshfel and other organisations believe that the evaluation is a pre-text of the European Commission to abolish the SFS. In fact, the programme has already been thoroughly evaluated many times since its creation in 2009. Freshfel and 11 other organisations from the fresh produce and health sectors sent an open letter to the European Commission calling for the maintenance of the SFS. At a stakeholder event with the European Commission on 2 March 2015, Freshfel and many EU member states also confirmed the importance of keeping a strong European SFS.

The school fruit scheme is an important contribution to reverse the trend of increasing obesity rates among children. At present, there are 22 million overweight children in the EU of which 5.1 million are obese - an EU-wide trend set to make another 1.2 million children overweight and 300,000 obese each year. The SFS has proved to be a remarkable instrument to help children discover taste, texture and diversity of fruit and vegetables and increase consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables among kids. This can greatly help tackle the growing problem of child obesity in the EU.

For more information:
Freshfel
Email: info@freshfel.org
www.freshfel.org