At first it was just puzzling. Farmers were ringing in to say their hens were laying between 10 and 30 per cent fewer eggs. Some of them appeared to have lost their appetite. It was February. De Brabander, an animal feed compounder from Roulers, near Ghent in northern Belgium, asked its vet to investigate and carry out tests. The small firm, which employs some 30 workers and turns over some 120,000 tons of feed a year, was worried. It could be liable.
By the end of the month, it was clear it had a major problem. Chicken producers were now experiencing a dramatic fall of up to 50 per cent in hatchings. And many of those hatchlings were displaying strange disorders of the nervous system, appearing drunk, unable to stand. Near Bruges another feed producer, HuysVoeders, was also beginning to get calls.
The unfolding crisis, in its uniquely Belgian bureaucratic and ham-fisted way, would once again expose the complex interdependence of a modern society and its vulnerability to the consequences of industrialised agriculture. Within months the problems of the intensively-reared battery hens of Ghent would be those of the whole country.
Today the Belgian government admits that there is no way of securely identifying the source of individual consignments of milk in supermarkets. If one batch is tainted, all of it is. And the government must weigh the uncertain risks of diluted poisons against the staggering costs of closing a whole industry.
In the end, this week they opted to ignore the risk in milk and many dairy products but temporarily closed down the beef, pork and butter industries. Export bans by the EU were compounded by blockades of the roads by angry farmers determined to stop imports. The supermarket shelves were cleared and demand for alternative products soared - ostrich and kangaroo meat demand bounded.
On March 3rd, de Brabander contacted its insurance company, whose expert, Dr Andre Destickere of the Institute for Veterinary Expertise, set to work assuming the usual causes of such problems, vitamin or protein deficiency, or the presence of heavy metals. Finding no easy answers he sent samples of the feed for testing and notified the ministry of agriculture. The ministry can have had few doubts that they had a problem on their hands - Dr Destickere was also their chief vet for western Flanders. The origins of the suspect feed were easily identified and on March 24th the ministry raided and carried out tests on the premises of Flemish specialist fat renderer Verkest, which had the contract to supply De Brabander with animal fat. Animal feeds consist mostly of grain with animal fats added to boost proteins and calories. Meat and bone meal is still also allowed in poultry feed, but not for beef or pork.
In fact, it emerged, Verkest had been mixing vegetable fats, almost certainly used oil from local chip shops, with its supplies in breach of its contract. Some locals have even suggested that, faced with huge competitive pressures, they may have used old motor or transformer oil for the same purpose.
In January, the firm confirmed to the inspectors it had sent out about 80,000 kg of fat to 10 separate feed-stuff producers, De Brabander and Huys-Voeders among them. In the former's case, the fat had been poured into an empty silo - dilution of the fat elsewhere would mean far less dramatic effects on chicken.
Lucien and his son Jan Verkest run their specialist family business from the village of Grummene, also near Ghent. The 80-foot chimney of their fat-melting plant dominates the skyline of the flat landscape. But there have been few complaints about the smelly plant. Lucien, now the owner of a stable of racehorses, had started out as a butcher's helper. But in 1959, locals recall, he set out on his own on a bicycle round local butchers collecting their left-overs which he and his wife then rendered down. Within a few years he was prospering and the rendering business was among the five biggest in Belgium. Strange then that the firm, which turns over some £10 million a year, rarely declares a profit of more than £20,000.
Two days after the first raid officials from the ministry returned to Verkest and established that the latter had misled inspectors about the contents of the fat consignments and that, between raids, it had doctored its books to conceal the fact.
The father and son have since been arrested and charged with illegally tampering with their records and are now in jail awaiting trial.
Yet it is still not clear whether their adulteration of the animal fats was responsible for the dioxin contamination. A Belgian prosecutor has been investigating the company and four of its suppliers to see if the dioxin could have come from them and whether the contamination was deliberate fraud or accidental.
His work, because of the peculiarities of the Belgian legal system, remains secret until complete, even from the authorities, considerably hampering public health decision-making.
Meanwhile, by the end of March the word was out in the industry that there was a problem and firms were being warned to take particular care of the conditions under which fats were stored.
One feed-stuff manufacturer, Fogra, even wrote to its suppliers, the managers of sites where businesses could dump used oil and grease: "For some time now the quality of greases and fats used by chip shops and which we recycle has been subject to strong criticism. The reason, the death of a number of chickens in Flanders."
But the public would not know of any problem for another full two months.
Informed first on March 13th of the De Brabander problem, the Department of Agriculture was told on April 24th of the identification of dioxins by Destickere's private testing company. It immediately quarantined 15 farms and began investigating over 300 others. A week later the department informed the French authorities it might have some contaminated supplies. Another week, and the Dutch were given the same message. By now disgruntled quarantined farmers were wondering how to let the press know of their plight.
Another fortnight passed before the official tests confirmed "high levels of dioxin", up to 800 times normal background levels in the De Brabander chickens, and the European Commission was informed. Then the public. And the government moved to withdraw poultry, eggs and egg products from shops.
Then it emerged that beef, pork, and dairy products were also affected and they too were to be removed from the shelves of shops - incinerated at a cost to the government of 30 pence per kilogram - although in the case of the dairy products the measures were somewhat half-hearted.
The government's hand was now forced by the European Commission, which on Monday decreed that it should ban sale on the internal market or for export of any produce which they could not certify as uncontaminated.
The response internationally was immediate, and not just confined to Belgian food. The US, China, Japan and other markets banned all EU dairy products, chicken, beef and pork, a reaction denounced as "disproportionate" by the Commission, which has been desperately briefing third countries about the measures now in place.
THE Belgian authorities' response to the crisis, as always in this country, was hampered by bureaucratic failure at best, cover-up at worst. Why had it taken two months to tell the public? Two months during which farms may have been closed but contaminated products already on the market went untraced.
The government, to the fury of its EU partners, yesterday had still not completed its lists of affected farms, let alone of those to whom they had sold on produce.
The Ministers for Health and for Agriculture, Karel Pinxten and Marcel Colla, have been forced to resign, claiming lamely that they had only latterly been able to confirm a problem because of the delay involved in local tests. Colla insisted: "We took the necessary decisions."
Not so, says a furious Destickere of the Institute for Veterinary Expertise. "I am particularly cross," he told the RTBF television station, "because both Pinxten and Colla lied to the public. It's not true they had to wait until the end of May to know if there was dioxin in the chickens."
His report, faxed to Colla on April 28th, said unambiguously that there was a threat to public health, Destickere insists: "My clear impression was that the idea was not to tip off the public, but as soon as my insurance report was leaked by the paper VRT they could no longer avoid a scandal." Since then Destickere has had his contract as chief vet for west Flanders cancelled by the ministry, ostensibly because his insurance work represented a conflict of interest. Others suggest it was because of his willingness to speak out.
The government has continued to respond hamfistedly - the prime minister's wife, Mrs Dehaene, even went to the press to say she was still feeding chicken to her children, dismissing the whole affair as "exaggerated". Scarcely reassuring.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel. The government insists that the contamination, unlike BSE in Britain, was once-off and affected only one batch of fat. The Commission admits to not yet being altogether convinced - "we must check everything", the Consumer Commissioner, Ms Emma Bonino, said yesterday. But, if correct, once the products of that batch are isolated life can return to normal.
Reports from extensive testing will be available next week and are expected to confirm that, if a danger was there, it has passed. The truth is that the most contaminated chickens were on the market well before the end of May.
On Thursday the ministry of agriculture finally came up with a provisional list of 1,400 affected farms. That means that 83 per cent of the beef and dairy sectors are in the clear, 60 per cent of the pork sector, and 70 per cent of the chicken sector.
The government has moved to certify produce from these unaffected farms and has allowed abbatoirs to start killing again. But recovery in the domestic market will be a slow process, and foreign markets even slower, although production at exporters like the chocolate producer Leonidas has started up once again.
Yet if an end to the food crisis is in sight, the bill will still have to be paid, put variously at between £1 billion and £2 billion. And the political price for the government may also be high, with tomorrow's general election likely to result in the replacement of the Christian-Social/Socialist coalition by one involving the Liberals. There are also considerable fears of major electoral gains by the far-right Vlaams Blok. Across the country there has been the further hammering of public confidence in Belgium's deeply-compromised state institutions.
Five ministers have been forced to resign in the last two years - two over the escape of the paedophile Dutroux, one over the accidental killing by suffocation of a Ghanaian deportee, Semira Adanu, and two over the dioxin scare. Few believe that the country's reform of its police and legal services has yet tackled the problems exposed by the Dutroux affair or the Agusta bribery sandal. Meanwhile, the issue has re-ignited a debate within the EU about intensive agriculture production methods and particularly the need for more controls on feed-stuffs, which the Commissioner for Agriculture, Mr Franz Fischler, yesterday promised to pursue.
EU legislation prohibits putting a huge range of things in animal feeds - from faeces, bits of digestive tracts, sawdust, sludge from sewage plants. But as the Commission's spokesman on agriculture, Gerry Kiely, acknowledged last week, the negative list "doesn't contain bricks and mortar" because no one ever suspected that anyone would want to include them in their chickens' diet. Nor does it contain motor oil.
