July 14, 1999. Copyright 1999. Graphic News. All rights reserved.

END OF BRITISH BEEF BAN

LONDON, July 14, 1999, Graphic News: BRITISH BEEF could soon be on foreign menus again with the expected European Commission announcement that it plans to lift a worldwide ban on British beef exports from August 1.
The news will end a trade blockade imposed more than three years ago in response to consumer fears about the spread of BSE, or mad cow disease.
The lifting of the ban is expected to trigger a major marketing campaign designed to regain lost export sales which have cost the beef industry £1.5 billion.
But even when the ban is lifted, precautionary restrictions will still apply.
Under the the so-called Òdate-basedÓ scheme all meat for export must be de-boned and come from cattle born after August 1, 1996 Ð the date on which a ban came into force on the feeding to animals of meat and bone-meal. In addition, meat from cattle more than 30 months old will not be sold overseas.
Exports from Northern Ireland were allowed to resume a year ago because the province has a sophisticated computerized cattle monitoring and checking system unmatched in England, Wales and Scotland.
National FarmersÕ Union president Ben Gill said: ÒThis is very welcome news and it has been long overdue.Ó
Mr Gill said the export market for British beef in 1995 had been worth up to £750m and now farmers would have to start from scratch again.
The BSE crisis will have resulted in the loss of more than 44,000 jobs in the UK by the end of the year, according to research by economists at Reading University.
The effect in farming is limited to 1,475 job losses, but the knock-on is in other industries such as meat and milk processing, feed and machinery manufacturers. Hardest hit is the meat industry which accounts for more than 20,000 lost jobs.
EU countries have suffered more than 177,000 cases of BSE and the UK accounts for all but 700 of them, according to the European Commission.
Forty-three people, 42 in the UK, have died from the new variation of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human brain condition thought to be linked to BSE.

/ENDS
Sources: BBC, Financial Times