THE WEEK THAT WAS... (Mar. 4, 2013)

A European Commission official told the European Parliament last week that ‘the clock is ticking and we need to act now’. Was he talking about Cyprus? European Commissioner Olli Rehn warned that the island state has to leave the Eurozone if there is no proper deal about a bail-out and a bankruptcy will follow.

Was it an alert that the European food processing industry is running out of horses and very soon there will be no more lasagne in the cold aisles of the supermarkets? Or was it about Italy where according to the German opposition leader, the socialist Peer Steinbrück, two clowns won the national elections?

Reuters reported that the day after the Italian elections European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said "should we determine our policy, our economic policy, by short-term electoral considerations or by what has to be done to put Europe back on the path to sustainable growth? For me the answer is clear." We already knew that referendums are not very popular in the EU buildings around ‘Rond Point Schuman’ in Brussels; EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy made that clear again when visiting London last week. But attention, here is the next downgrading of democracy in the EU: results of elections are less important than ‘our’ economic policy, dixit the President of the European Commission.

By the way, what was the alarming subject that the Commission official raised? European bees! They ’face a disastrous decline in their numbers and multiple reasons are responsible for rising bee mortality and the collapse of bee colonies…’. EU-wide action has already been taken to address the issue. Let’s hope that a proper EU-wide solution for this problem will be in time.