Pressure on EU for lengthy ban on British beef

WHEN the EU's standing veterinary committee meets today to discuss the BSE scare it will be faced by the reality that already 12 member states of the Union and 20 countries throughout the world have introduced their own bans on imports of British beef. Ireland and Denmark alone in the EU have not introduced bans.

Whatever its scientific advisers say about the dangers, the committee will be under intense political pressure to recommend to the Commission that some kind of a ban on British beef imports should be made semi permanent.

The Commission, which is likely to debate the committee's recommendations on Wednesday - and has the option of ignoring them - faces a difficult dilemma. A failure to extend the emergency national bans, which are legal only until the Commission has taken a decision, could leave a number of member states, under huge domestic pressure, deciding to continue with their own bans illegally and thus opening up the prospect of enormously unpopular litigation.

Or it could mean the continued sale of British beef in EU markets and the danger of either civil disorder - there were violent demonstrations in France over the weekend - or a catastrophic loss of consumer confidence in the whole EU beef industry, a prospect with devastating financial consequences.

The group of independent scientific experts which advises the committee met on Friday, but has so far refused to divulge its recommendations beyond stating that "the committee recognises that further reduction of the risk of spread of the BSE agent can be achieved by excluding from the food chain animals most likely to have been exposed to infection and therefore possibly harbouring infectivity".

Observers have taken this to imply special measures targeted at cattle over 30 months old, a view confirmed partially by the British Minister for Agriculture, Mr Douglas Hogg, who admitted on television yesterday that the advisory committee did not recommend a slaughter policy "but did focus on the problem of cows over the age of 30 months". There were very few cases of cattle under that age infected by BSE, he said.

Sources in Brussels do not expect the standing committee, which votes by qualified majority, or the Commission to go beyond taking measures to protect the markets and consumers of the other 14 member states. Even recommending to the British that they should slaughter some of their herd is regarded as fraught with political dangers - better to let the logic of the collapse of their markets force the British to take the decision "freely" for themselves.

Not that there won't be calls on Brussels to help with a compensation package, as the British Labour Party's agriculture spokesman, Mr Gavin Strang, made clear yesterday when he called for a limited cull of the national herd. "We want a package, hopefully supported by Europe, funded from the Common Agricultural Policy, to accelerate reduction of the number of BSE cases," he said.

A cull would be enormously expensive, even if applied only to the 1 million of the 11 million British herd which was born before 1990. Currently, the British Ministry of Agriculture is paying compensation of £700 sterling per BSE infected animal put down. With the costs of slaughter and incineration added on, experts put the bill for such a limited slaughter at well in excess of £1 billion sterling. The slaughter of the full herd could cost up to £20 billion sterling.

The implications for the British economy and the EU's farm budget are colossal - only 10 days ago the Commission identified savings in the farm budget between 1997 and 1999 of £4 billion, largely attributable to the GATT reforms.

The Commission President, Mr Jacques Santer, had suggested that half the savings could be returned to the member states and the other half invested in job creation projects such as the Trans European Networks.