THE price of beef is set to plummet after food safety experts decided it was safe to lift a key safeguard against BSE-infected meat.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) will recommend to the government next month that the ban on beef from cattle aged over 30 months should be scrapped because there is no scientific justification for keeping it.
If the government agrees, it will res
ult in an extra 220,000 tonnes of beef hitting the shelves of British supermarkets and butcher’s shops annually.
Britons currently eat 900,000 tonnes of beef a year, so a 25% increase in supply of the product will lead to a big fall in prices, currently running at around £6.50 a pound for prime cuts.
The Treasury is pressing for the ban to be removed as quickly as possible - it costs taxpayers £400m a year to destroy thousands of healthy cattle - but farmers’ leaders warn that releasing such huge quantities of beef on to the market at once could lead to a collapse in the industry.
They want the ban to be lifted in stages and for ministers to force the European Union into reopening the lucrative export markets.
The ban was introduced in 1996 after it emerged infected beef was the probable cause of vCJD that has so far killed more than 130 people in the UK.
Experts are now convinced that the BSE epidemic has been beaten and, with other protective measures still in place, it is safe for the ban to be lifted.
The FSA board meets next month to finalise its recommendations on lifting the ban following a detailed consultation exercise. If ministers accept the recommendations, the ban will be replaced by a new testing regime for slaughtered cattle in January next year.
Consumer experts said the lifting of the ban would be good news for meat buyers. Graeme Millar, chairman of the Scottish Consumer Council, said: "If it becomes available over butchers’ counters then it might bring people back to beef as it is likely to become available at a cheaper price.
"What the government has to do first, however, is convince the consumer that this meat is safe to eat. This ban has been in place for a long time and consumer perception is a fickle thing."
The Over Thirty Months (OTM) rule was introduced to take older animals, the ones most likely to have developed BSE, out of the food chain.
The two other main measures are the removal of Specified Risk Material (SRM), which removed 95% of infectivity from all cattle and a ban on feeding them meat and bone meal from other potentially contaminated farm animals. These measures are unlikely ever to be scrapped.
The measures were brought in when the epidemic was raging and around 10,000 potentially infected animals were thought to be entering the food chain. The OTM rule alone has cost £3.2bn so far.
But the number of confirmed cases of BSE in the UK has now fallen from 14,475 in 1995 to 474 last year and just 16 so far this year.
A scientific review of the risk, carried out for the FSA by Professor Neil Ferguson of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College, London, has now concluded that scrapping the OTM ban would have a negligible effect on new cases of vCJD.
Dr Lydia Wilkie, deputy director of the Scottish FSA, said the agency’s stakeholder working group on lifting the ban had "fully accepted" the new risk assessment. "That is that the situation has changed dramatically over the last seven years and the risks are now negligible," she said.
The two options currently under consideration are scrapping the ban entirely or excluding from the food chain animals born before August 1996 when the ban was properly enforced.
Even the second option would release an extra 500,000 animals or 150,000 tonnes of beef onto the market.
Although beef consumption plunged by 25% in 1996 at the height of BSE hysteria, the market has now recovered. Industry experts said lifting the ban now could be a double-edged sword if not handled properly.
Jim Walker, the chairman of Quality Meat Scotland (QMS), said scrapping the OTM rule would be "great news" for the livestock industry.
"The scientific basis to allow us to leave the BSE legacy behind is crucial in gaining free access to both home and export markets," Walker said.
But such a sudden substantial or total lifting of the OTM rule would drive prices down to levels below which the industry would struggle to survive, warned Walker.
QMS wants only cattle born after January 2000 to be allowed on to the market initially so that it was not flooded with too much beef. "A controlled, phased approach is the best solution," said Walker.
The National Farmers Union Scotland said a lifting of the ban must be accompanied by a relaxation of European Union rules restricting the export of Scotch beef to overseas markets, a trade worth £130m a year before exports dried up in the mid-1990s.
"We do not believe the domestic market can cope with all this beef and so opening up export markets will be vital," said a spokesman.
One farmer who stands to gain from the lifting of the ban is Robin Spence, who produces around 1,200 cattle for the beef market every year from his land near Lockerbie.
"The industry suffered a devastating blow in 1996 when both the domestic and expert markets collapsed. Now it does I hope the public will have renewed confidence in one of this country’s finest products."
The full article contains 963 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
