A meeting of European agriculture ministers voted to withdraw from the food chain all cows more than 30 months old unless tested for he disease. This will mean the slaughter over a number of years of some 2 million head of cattle. Special incinerators will have to be constructed to dispose of the carcasses.

The next day, 10,000 farmers demonstrated in Clermont-Ferrand in France to demand they be fully compensated for their losses and another 3,000 marched in Nantes. About 200 farmers took their cows to Paris, where they rallied in front of the Ministry of Agriculture. At the same time, the main farmers union, the FNSEA, said that while the measures were a "positive step for the consumer," they offered no guarantees that the farmers would be adequately compensated.

Most cattle raisers in France are small farmers with herds averaging between 50 and 75 heads. While 233,000 farmers raise cattle, most carry out other agricultural activities as well. But even the 30,000 farmers that specialize in cattle raising as their sole activity have an average income of only 130,000 francs a year--about the same as that of a factory worker in a skilled position (1 franc=US 14 cents). The question of adequate indemnities is crucial to these farmers, since if one cow is found to have this disease the entire herd is destroyed.

Under pressure, the European Union has agreed to finance 70 percent of the purchase and cost of destruction of all cows more than 30 months old. The rest of the cost is to be financed by individual member states. However, the farmers unions have not yet reached an agreement with EU officials as to the method of calculating the value of their herds.

For years, the French and German governments have carefully nurtured an atmosphere against imports of beef from Britain, stating it is a source of the mad cow disease, known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). Similar campaigns have been waged against imports of beef treated with growth hormones and genetically modified plants. The latter two are produced in the United States and have been banned by the European Union.

Both the French and German governments claimed to have taken effective measures to control the spread of BSE. But as the disease began showing up on the Continent, arguments once used by French and German capitalists to justify their boycott of "British" beef have now been turned against them.

Dozens of other countries are now using the same reasons to ban imports of beef from France and Germany.

So far, BSE has developed into a full-fledged epidemic only in Britain, where 180,000 cases have been officially diagnosed and 4.5 million head of cattle destroyed. But Portugal has now recorded almost 500 cases of BSE with 170 cases in 1999 alone. Ireland has had more than 500 cases and Switzerland is not far behind.

The governments of Germany and Spain announced their first cases in November. Up to the end of 1999, only 79 cases of BSE had been reported in France. However, the number has almost tripled during the last year. With three new cases a week, claims by the French government to have taken effective measures to stop the spread of the disease have collapsed. Normandy and Brittany have been hit particularly hard.

Beef sales have dropped 50 percent. Schools, such as those in Bordeaux, France, and in Geneva, Switzerland, announced they would no longer serve beef on their menus. Italy, Spain, Austria, and other European Union countries announced boycotts of French beef. Egypt announced a four-week ban on all beef imports from 12 European countries.

Workers and farmers of these countries now face massive destruction of infected herds, higher supermarket prices for meat and dairy products, and the still unknown scope of the problem that has begun to spread to human beings. Tens of thousands of farmers are facing ruin and risk losing their farms as a result.  
 
Capitalist competition
In the 1980s, France was the leading importer of British beef. But France is also the world's second largest agricultural exporter and has been eagerly eyeing the beef market once dominated by its British competitors. The French government helped push through the European Union's embargo of British beef, adopted in March 1996, thus opening up a major new market for French capitalists.

The U.S. government plays the same game as well. In December 1997, Washington banned imports of beef and mutton from European countries, although the disease existed only in Britain at that time. This cut French capitalists out of the U.S. market.

German agriculture minister Karl-Heinz Funke declared in early November that he was "absolutely convinced" that Germany is immune. People can eat German beef "without fear," he said. Several regions in Germany voted motions asking the German government to block all imports of beef from Britain, Ireland, France, and Switzerland. However, only one week later, Austria, Belgium, and The Netherlands adopted boycotts of German beef when Germany reported its first case of BSE. With almost every member of the European Union banning each others' beef, the principle of "free trade" within the Union was being badly shaken.  
 
Contamination of feed
While the boycott of beef from Britain was strictly enforced in France, other measures were either never adopted or enforced. This was particularly the case concerning the continuing distribution--both legal and illegal--of BSE-infected meat and bone meal. Although the first clinical case of BSE was recognized in Britain in April 1985, it took the British government three years to limit the use of meat and bone meal. Even then, the production of such meal was still allowed for fertilizer and as feed for non-ruminant animals. The poultry industry, for example, still depends on such feed, as do fish farms. British capitalists made a major effort to export the infected meal.

Paris made only symbolic gestures in limiting the use of this, which is much cheaper than any other available source of protein in animal feed. A French government ban on meat and bone meal imports from Britain was followed by a 10-fold increase in imports from Belgium and Ireland. Since neither country is a major producer of the product, it was clear a second-party operation was involved. The French government, however, chose to ignore it.

Such fraud was apparently quite common. European inspectors found that three-quarters of all animal feed tested in Germany--where such feed has theoretically been banned since 1994--showed traces of meat and bone meal. German Farming Federation leader Gerd Sonnleitner pointed the finger at "the lax practices of the EU agriculture authorities [which] are to blame" for the spread of BSE into Germany.

Ten cattle raisers in the Vosges mountains in eastern France, members of the FDSEA farmers union, went to court in 1996 demanding that the government determine the real source of animal feed. They promised to withdraw from the market any cows shown to have been exposed to meat and bone meal. The government has so far refused to supply the court with the necessary documents. In the face of growing farmers protests, the judge has finally ordered the Ministry of Agriculture to pay 1 million francs a day if all documents were not produced within a week.

With protests and economic boycotts spreading, the European agriculture ministers met in emergency session December 4, voting to forbid all meat and bone feed for all animals for a period of six months. It is still permitted, however, to use the meal as fertilizer.

This is a costly measure. The 3 million tons of meal produced each year are worth $1.3 billion. Destroying the meal will cost an additional $3.3 billion. The feed would have to be replaced with millions of tons of more expensive soy meal, imported from the United States. This would necessitate lifting the European Union's ban on importing genetically modified organisms and would add billions of dollars more to the overall cost.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home