EU neighbours Poland and Slovakia wage cheese war


dpa German Press Agency
Published: Tuesday February 6, 2007

Warsaw- It is white, chewy, very salty, squeaks against
your teeth when you take a bite and has been made from sheep's milk
by Carpathian mountain highlanders for centuries.
But now European Union regulations have feisty Polish and Slovak
highlanders fighting over who has the official right to produce
'oscypek' cheese as a regional speciality.

"The Slovak attack on oscypek," reads a headline in the Tuesday
edition of Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza daily. The report details an
official protest launched Monday by Slovakia against Warsaw's request
for the EU rights to oscypek as a Polish regional delicacy.

Highlanders on the northern Polish side of the mighty Carpathian
Mountains have been producing the cheese for centuries. But,
according to Bratislava, so have Slovak highlanders living on the
southern Slovak side of the Carpathians.

"Oscypek has long been produced in Slovakia's Orava region,"
Slovak official Jozef Repasky told Gazeta Wyborcza. "The residents of
this region want to continue producing this cheese."

But Polish highlanders want the exclusive right to use the popular
name 'oscypek' in the EU.

"We have documents showing six centuries of oscypek tradition in
the Polish part of the Carpathian mountains," boast Polish highlander
and Tatra mountain regional leader Andrzej Gasienica Makowski.

"As far as I know, the Slovaks can't produce any such
documentation, so there's a chance the European Commission will
reject their request," he told Gazeta Wyborca.

With the cheese war proceeding at full tilt, the Poles and the
Slovaks now have six months to make peace.

An EU spokesman quoted by Gazeta Wyborcza said a compromise could
be found in that it may be possible to grant EU oscypek production
rights to both Polish and Slovak highlanders.

© 2006 - dpa German Press Agency