The EU's Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner, Mr David Byrne, has pledged to help keep small scale local food producers in business and said the EU does not want to regulate them out of business.
Traditional food producers have been complaining that they cannot afford to comply with new EU regulations on hygiene and other areas and that they are being driven out of business.
However, last week Mr Byrne pledged to keep the small producers in business and said he had already made moves to ensure that they could continue to operate.
"Take for instance, the hygiene regulations. We have included in that a provision which relates to traditional foods," he said.
"Where a member-state can identify a traditional food being made in a particular way for a long time, there can be a derogation from the legislation," he said.
"This could happen as long as there can be an assurance given on the preservation of food safety but it is acknowledged that the process is not particularly compliant with the legislation," he said.
"That can be done because we are sensitive to that issue."
He also revealed that he had asked the Agriculture Commissioner, Dr Franz Fischler, to ensure that funds would be available for the promotion and protection of small producers from Rural Development funds in the reformed CAP.
"We are certainly conscious of this issue and I became particularly conscious of it mainly from visits to the southern member-states, particularly Italy," he said.
Mr Byrne said it is becoming more and more of an issue in Ireland as he had learned when he visited the Organic Food Fair in Wicklow recently.
"I am perfectly conscious of the fact that this is increasingly becoming a major issue in food production in Ireland but we are attuned to it," he said.
He said the Department of Agriculture and Food in Ireland also had a certain degree of discretion to ensure that traditional foods were preserved.
"I was very sensitive to the criticism that could very easily be made if we are over rigorous in our pursuit of food safety. We have, of course to be rigorous," he said.
"It is very easy for people to say that we are banning food that my father and grandfather ate but that can be taken to an exaggerated state.
"That kind of problem can cause disproportionate political damage to the institutions of the European Union," he said.
However, Mr Byrne said, the Union was in the business of trying to preserve cultural diversity and diversity in food production.
"After all, we are not like other major trading blocks that I will not mention. Our food here is better and you can travel from place to place and get good different foods. We don't want to change that, we want to preserve that," he told journalists in Brussels last week.