PROF PATRICK Wall, chairman of the European Food Safety Authority, has called for the lifting of the EU ban on feeding meat and bonemeal to pigs and poultry so grain can be diverted to the world’s starving people.
Prof Wall, who was head of Ireland’s first Food Safety Authority, questioned whether it was ethically correct to feed grain to animals in the middle of a global food crisis. The EU imposed a ban on feeding rendered animal carcases to pigs and poultry over eight years ago because of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) crisis.
Recently, the European Commission asked the Food Safety Authority to give its opinion on whether or not the ban should be lifted on poultry and pig rations because of falling incidences of BSE. The authority said feeding meat and bonemeal to poultry presented “negligible risk” to human health.
“Soya meal and other grain prices are going through the roof. Is it morally and ethically correct to be destroying this food when people are starving? No one I know is worried about the science. There is only concern about consumer reaction,” Prof Wall said.
The ban on feeding meat and bonemeal to cattle and sheep from the remains of processed cattle was imposed in the late 1980s and there is no question of this ban being lifted in the foreseeable future, said Dr Wall. However, when the ban was extended to pig and poultry rations in 2001, it increased the costs faced by pig and poultry farmers who had to rely on grain as a feed source.
Prof Wall’s comments came as the World Food Summit in Rome was being addressed by Minister for Agriculture and Food Brendan Smith.
He said during 2008 international prices of all major food commodities hit their highest levels in nearly 50 years. The total cost of food imports for low-income food-deficit countries was 24 per cent higher in 2007 than in 2006, rising to $107 billion (€69 billion).
He noted that Ireland’s overseas development assistance will reach the target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income by 2012, and that a central part of the international response has to be support for sustainable agricultural production in Africa, and other food-deficit regions.
Mr Smith also referred to the World Trade Organisation negotiations and said food security must become a policy imperative.
“We should give ourselves the time and space to consider the potential interactions between the Doha development round and the current world food market situation,” he told the conference.