PROSPECTS for defusing the "beef war" with the EU have improved with Britain's latest proposal, EU sources said yesterday.
The British plan, which lists five steps for gradually lifting the ban over an unspecified time, will be discussed by EU veterinary officials today. Acceptance of the plan by EU member states at or before next week's EU summit in Florence would defuse the row that has put Britain and its partners at loggerheads.
London has vowed to block all EU business until it gets a framework for lifting the ban, imposed in March amid fears that mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), may be transmitted to humans.
French politicians and the media, meanwhile, rounded on London yesterday after confirmation that Britain exported tens of thousands of tonnes of feed that may have included the remains of infected animals despite a 1988 ban on using it in Britain.
Infected feed is blamed for the spread of BSE, which has struck down some 160,000 British cattle since 1986.
Mr Henri Nallet, who was the French agriculture minister at that time, openly accused the British of not telling the truth over the exports, revealed in the British scientific journal, Nature.
The French press was forthright. "The crime of the English," screamed the front page headline in the mass circulation France Sair, while the conservative Le Figaro said: "France is the dustbin for British feed".
"The principal and undeniable guilty party is the government of [the then prime minister] Margaret Thatcher," said France Soir in a front page editorial. "Like a dealer selling a drug which he knows to be lethal, [Britain sold] its stocks of tainted animal feed to the rest of the world when it had banned them at home," it added.
Nature reported that British feed, containing remains of sheep which might have been contaminated with scrapie, had been exported to Europe, Israel and Thailand between 1989 and 1991, even though the use of such feed for beef and dairy herds in Britain had been banned since June 1988.
The journal, in its Thursday issue, said that customs data showed that British exports of the Iced had doubled from 1989 and that most of the product had gone to France. Overall 70,000 tonnes was exported in a three year period.
Mr Luc Guyau, leader of the main farmers' union FNSEA, wondered "if Britain still has its place in the European Union" and said London's policy of non cooperation in EU business was "scandalous".
The British government yesterday claimed it was making progress towards lifting the EU ban on British beef exports. "But we are not there yet", Mr Major, said after a meeting in Downing Street with the Italian Prime Minister, Mr Romano Prodi.