I don’t know about “large countries”, Fred. What I do know is that, thanks to the EU, certifying the provenance of many processed (and even some unprocessed) foodstuffs is virtually impossible. We have the ridiculous situation where meat (and the animal it came from) need not have touched these shores until it arrived butchered and frozen but, because it was wrapped in plastic in Walsall it can be labelled “British”.
As far as the horsemeat scandal goes, one only has to look at the causes to see how supply chain complexities (facilitated by the EU) make such malpractice if not inevitable, certainly highly likely:
“…an initial investigation has found that horsemeat sold as beef originated from Romanian slaughterhouses before being sold to a Dutch food trader, then on to a Cypriot trader and on again to a French firm.”
How on earth can UK retailers keep track of such ridiculous nonsense? How can they rely on the authenticity of goods when they originate from industries in nations which, to put it kindly, are not quite so rigorous with the regulations as they should be?
Whilst it is true that the scandal was mainly caused by intentional deception on the part of some traders, the EU has still not acted to close the loopholes that clearly exist which result in shoppers being misled:
http://www.globalmeatnews.com/Industry-Markets/EC-rejects-full-country-of-origin-labelling-for-meat-products
This sort of thing is inevitable when a trading bloc the size and complexity of the EU seems to believe it can act as a single nation state (and allow nonsensical and useless labelling such as “produce of the EU”).