The EU Commission is preparing new directives on the control of the foot-and-mouth outbreak currently ravaging Britain and which has been detected in France, farm ministers meeting in Brussels were told yesterday.
The meeting heard reports on the situation from Mr Nick Brown, the British Minister for Agriculture, and Mr Jean Glavany, the French minister, who appealed for a lifting of the ban on French animals and animal products from next week.
The Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, told his European colleagues that regulations covering the importation of food from outside the Union needed strengthening. He said the two most recent cases of highly contagious diseases, foot-and-mouth and classical swine fever, had been caused by the feeding to animals of imported untreated food. He called for much tighter monitoring of imported food and for traceability on such food when it is further processed inside the Union.
The ministers were told that new directives covering the importation of food and the control of exotic diseases were being drawn up, but they continued to resist calls for a vaccination campaign, insisting the policy of destroying suspect animals and restricting livestock movements was the best way of handling the outbreak.
EU governments are reluctant to launch a costly immunisation programme unless the disease begins to spin out of control, and officials have argued that any immunisation campaign would be expensive and cost European nations their current "foot-and-mouth free" status in world trade markets.
Experts also point out that vaccinations are not 100 per cent effective and could hinder tracking the disease as vaccinated animals carry the same antibodies as those infected.
The EU Agriculture Commissioner, Mr Franz Fischler, said the EU's beef market is showing tentative signs of recovery after months of decline sparked by consumer fears of mad cow disease. He said an EU programme to boost sales by buying up and destroying carcasses of older cattle was also having an effect in helping the market to recover. The EU said 240,000 tons of beef had been taken out of the market through its "purchase for destruction scheme", mostly in France and Ireland.
Ms Renate Kuenast, Germany's agriculture minister, said his country would join the purchase-for-destruction programme next week, and could destroy up to 100,000 head of cattle before April. The EU is poised to change the system to allow countries to place the meat in subsidised storage instead of destroying it.
Latest figures released by the EU show beef consumption is down 25 per cent across the 15nation bloc. Germany is worst hit, with sales down 50 per cent, followed by a drop of 42 per cent in Italy and 35 per cent in Spain. -