- BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Beef
is being kept off the European market as authorities struggle with new
rules to ban older meat from the food chain unless found free of mad cow
disease, officials said.
-
- In response to rising numbers of mad cow cases across
Europe, all meat from cattle aged over 30 months now has to be tested for
the brain-wasting disorder, but a lack of facilities is holding up the
delivery of meat to the shops.
-
- In France, cattle dealers brought gridlock to roads around
Paris in protest of the government's handling of the crisis, and in Italy
the government announced a new mad cow task force.
-
- According to the Belgian Federation of Slaughterhouses,
a lack of suitable testing laboratories was already causing mounting supply
bottlenecks.
-
- "There are not only too few analyses, but the test
results are too slow to come through," it said in a statement.
-
- "The freezers in the slaughterhouses are full. The
carcasses cannot be released for human consumption."
-
- The new measures bring continental Europe into line with
Britain, which barred meat from animals over 30 months in the wake of the
mad cow crisis in the early 1990s.
-
- Britain's Over Thirty Months Scheme (OTMS) has resulted
in millions of cattle being slaughtered at a cost of billions of pounds.
-
-
-
- FRENCH PROTESTS
-
- French Farm Minister Jean Glavany was due to hold urgent
talks on Monday with meat industry representatives amid growing criticism
of a "climate of confusion".
-
- There are so far only 18 laboratories in France certified
by the government to perform the tests, leading to beef piling up in cold
storage pending the results.
-
- Louis Orenga, director of France's Meat Information Centre,
predicted beef prices in some areas could rise between one and two francs
per kilo because of a lack of available supplies.
-
- But he said the confusion could dissuade consumers from
returning to beef.
-
- "We're giving consumers the impression that this
situation is not being managed well," he told Reuters.
-
- "We're going to have another case in which consumers
see dysfunction at all levels."
-
- In Italy, testing had also got off to a slow start.
-
- The health ministry said the supplier of equipment needed
to carry out the tests was struggling to meet demand and it would be a
few more weeks before the programme could begin.
-
- UNTESTED CATTLE DESTROYED
-
- Untested beef is eligible for a "purchase for destruction"
scheme -- under which farmers are paid to have older cattle destroyed if
no tests are available -- but the programme, mostly funded from EU coffers,
has also had its teething problems.
-
- Again the problem was insufficient capacity, officials
said.
-
- "There are bottlenecks at the rendering plants,
and this is a big problem," Jean-Luc Meriaux of the Brussels- based
European Meat Trading Association (UECBV) told Reuters.
-
- "The scheme has not been very well implemented."
-
- In Spain there have also been signs that the disposal
of carcasses will not be easy. Some 300 cattle were recently found rotting
at the bottom of a disused mine in the north-western Galicia region, where
the majority of the country's mad cow cases have been discovered.
-
- However, some countries were confident of carrying out
full testing and reported only minor problems.
-
- The Association of Danish Meat Manufacturers was optimistic
capacity was sufficient to test up to 260,000 animals a year.
-
- The Dutch farm ministry said the daily capacity for 2,500
cattle had yet to be reached, but that it had only minor teething problems
with the testing programme.
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|