German beer can row rattles Stoiber poll campaign
Date: 13-Sep-02
Country: GERMANY
Brewers in Stoiber's Bavaria homeland, famous for its beer and its Oktoberfest beer festival, have attacked him for threatening to scrap a refund system for drink cans and bottles.
Opinion polls show Stoiber's conservative alliance running neck and neck with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats ahead of the September 22 poll.
The attacks are uncomfortable for Stoiber whose election campaign has focused on small and medium-sized enterprises like the brewers.
Schroeder's government plans to introduce a mandatory deposit and refund system for all drink cans and bottles in January to encourage greater recycling and reduce waste.
Stoiber wants to make the deposit system voluntary with beverage companies and retailers allowed to decide whether they want to introduce their own schemes.
But the brewers complain they have already invested billions of euros (dollars) in systems for handling deposits and refunds and that to scrap the initiative now would threaten jobs.
"Stopping the refund threatens the existence of thousands of medium-sized enterprises," several brewery and drinks chiefs wrote in an open letter to Stoiber in top-selling paper Bild.
In Munich, brewers drove about 100 trucks through the Bavarian city yesterday to make their point.
"About 250,000 jobs are directly dependent on the refund system. And they are at risk," said Roland Demleitner, head of a national association of about 800 breweries.
Stoiber faces the biggest opposition to his position in Bavaria. About 500 breweries belonging to the association are based in the southern state, Demleitner said.
A spokesman for the conservative Christian Democrats said the refund would hurt Germany's already frail economy.
In Germany, where households have a whole host of rubbish bins to collect different types of garbage, environmental issues have re-emerged in the election campaign after floods devastated vast swathes of the country, prompting fears of global warming.