THE €90 million EU free fruit and vegetable scheme for schools received the support of farm ministers in Luxembourg yesterday and will be implemented next year.
Modelled on the Irish Food Board's "food dude" scheme, the European Commission pledged the money to fight obesity in Europe, where 22 million children are deemed overweight and five million suffer from obesity.
The commission said in July it would pay for the purchase and distribution of fresh fruit and vegetables to schools, which would be matched by national funds in those member states that chose to make use of the programme.
Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith pledged his support for the scheme. He said the experience in Ireland with the scheme, on which the EU programme is based, had been very positive.
He said that the Irish Food Board's scheme encouraged primary schoolchildren to taste and enjoy fruit and vegetables and it would have reached 1,000 primary schools by the end of 2008.
"Our policies have consistently supported balanced diets. Low intakes of fruit and vegetables and milk by primary schoolchildren were established in a scientific study on children's diet carried out by Trinity and UCC with funding from my department and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.
"These findings have been addressed by the relaunch of the school milk scheme with a wider range of products and the scaling up of the fruit and vegetable scheme from pilot status," Mr Smith added.
In 2006, the then minister for agriculture Mary Coughlan announced the distribution of 1,000 refrigeration units free to schools to boost the dramatic drop in the free school milk scheme.
When the school milk scheme was introduced in 1982, children in Irish schools drank 2.6 million gallons of milk, but by 2006, consumption had declined to only 825,000 gallons, a fall of 66 per cent. Under the revised scheme, 500 fridges went to schools that were already operating the scheme and the 500 others to schools that were opting to join the scheme
Research had shown children were unhappy with the temperature at which milk was served in schools and many favoured fizzy soft drinks. The revamped scheme, which is being operated by the National Dairy Council, is now providing not only milk but other products like yogurts, low-fat and flavoured milks.
The free fruit and vegetable scheme will run alongside the revitalised milk scheme which has been operating in 2,000 primary schools with the support of the EU and the Department of Agriculture.
The farm ministers have been meeting in Luxembourg over the past two days to negotiate the "health check" of the Common Agricultural Policy (Cap), which will involve tighter budgetary controls and a redistribution of Cap funds.