The only question is who is responsible. The first suspects are the owners of the MEGA group of companies, with their vast network of warehouses stuffed with fake goods. They should face material or legal sanctions. But indirectly, many others must have grubby hands, and it will take months to establish exactly who they are. The hypermarkets are among the potential sinners, since the dodgy goods managed to get through their quality control filters for far too long. And we should look, too, at the inspections authorities, which clearly lack the power and the means to do their job properly.

Were the criminals' lives made easier by the fact that there are no customs inspections between European Union countries? There is no question about it. It is easy to move arms, drugs or stolen art works from a Dutch port to Italy. Despite this, nobody can seriously suggest returning to the old regime. The advantages (that you don't need a passport to go on holiday in Spain or France, and you can travel across three or four countries without having to hang around at each border) easily outweigh the drawbacks. The same goes for the national customs and inspections regimes.

In cases like the one seen in Torokbalint, the stock response is to blame the EU for exposing us to these shady foreign practices. But of course honest importers would suffer from the re-introduction of the old inspections regime almost as much as the fraudsters. Prices would rise. And we should warn people of the dangers of looking back nostalgically to the time before we joined the EU. Shop managers dealing dodgily in poor-quality meat and goods past their sell-by date would serve as a very good symbol of the economy of want we knew under the Kadar regime - and there were plenty of cases of faked wine and paprika being sold in the years following the regime change.

So talk like that just allows people to escape their moral, political and professional responsibility. Ferenc Gyurcsany announced: "In the future, all questions relating to food, plant and animal health will be the responsibility of the Minister for Agriculture and Regional Development and the human health and consumer protection inspectorates." As if this hadn't been the case before. Four or five departments, each with their own inspection regimes, all contributing to a state of chaos where the left hand never knows if a right hand even exists. The prime minister must be very proud of his swift response to the crisis. Maybe he failed to spot that we've been in the EU for almost three years. On 1 May 2004, did it occur to nobody that our accession might bring about food safety risks? Why were the relevant authorities not brought into line back then?

Probably for the same reasons that healthcare, public administration and higher education reforms were never carried out. There are too many interests. If five institutions are replaced by one, then four director-generals and many other civil servants can fetch their coats. There are lobbies - if you're used to swimming in murky waters, then transparency brings few benefits. And the country's leaders only start getting to grips with all this when - a budget deficit here, a food hygiene scandal there - the house is half-way to burning down. A free market offers greater opportunities for criminals. Nonetheless, effective state inspections could have minimized this risk. In Casino, Robert de Niro told a security guard: "If you didn't notice then you're crap at this job. If you did then you were involved. Either way, you're fired." Maybe the same approach should be adopted with certain inspectors. The saddest outcome would be if it turned out that nobody was responsible at all - that the machinery of the state was so badly constructed that it didn't work, even if each individual component was doing its job to perfection.

László Tamás Papp