Just when you thought it was safe to eat beef again, another scare comes along to reinvigorate the mad cow crisis. Last Tuesday the Blair government announced that it will snatch British boned beef (T-bone steaks, oxtails and ribs) off holiday plates for fear that it carries the dreaded mad cow disease (BSE) inside the bone marrow.
To further aggravate the situation, concerns about the safety of beef are leading to an escalation of agricultural protectionism within the European Union and the United States. The crisis is spiraling out of control once again even though the risk posed by British meat is ridiculously minuscule, a fact which has British farmers and consumers asking whether it is the officials and not the cows who have gone mad.
The start of the crisis came 21 months ago when the EU banned British beef because of fears that cows fed with animal parts could develop BSE, which some scientists contend causes the degenerative and fatal new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD) in humans. In an effort to deal with the threat, the U.K. Agricultural Ministry ordered millions of cattle slaughtered costing British taxpayers $10 billion. Under pressure from the EU, the Ministry also pushed through new legislation, which ensures that all spinal cords and brains of cattle, sheep and goats are not used for animal feed.
What Risk?
Despite the fact that British beef is now subject to more stringent tests than cattle from other EU countries, the ban on Britain's beef remains. This understandably annoyed British farmers. In response, U.K. Agricultural Minister Jack Cunningham announced that he will ban beef imports to Britain from countries that do not live up to the new British standards. "If our European colleagues don't take the action that I believe is necessary...their meat will not come into Britain," he warned at an EU agriculture ministers' meeting last week.
The ban starts on Jan. 1. But to show his European partners that he will also not tolerate any risk from British beef, even if eaten domestically, Mr. Cunningham banned British boned beef. At the same time the U.S. announced that it will ban most beef and lamb from all 15 EU countries (including the six with no BSE cases) because of fears over mad cow disease.
Last week, the EU announced that a reciprocal ban will begin in six months unless the U.S. increases checks on unnatural levels in American meat products of hormones and antibiotics--widely regarded by scientists as being safe. The ban would cover American beef derivatives such as gelatin, which would include $4 billion worth of American pharmaceuticals.
What's gotten lost in all the bans and counter-bans is the facts. Some 170,000 BSE cases have been found among British cattle, apparently because of the practice of feeding cows, which are herbivores, with the ground remains of other animals. However, about 20 cases of CJD have surfaced--there's a possibility more may occur as we do not know the incubation period of the disease, but the chances are remote given the time passed already. One of the many skeptical scientists, Gordon Stewart, emeritus professor of Public Health at Glasgow University, also asserts that the link between BSE and CJD is still not properly established, and whatever risk there was has now likely passed because the cause of BSE has been taken out of the food chain.
However, even if one accepts the science behind the latest U.K. ban on boned beef, the risk to the public is acknowledged as being so tiny as to be meaningless. Mr. Cunningham's move followed advice from the British government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) that there was a theoretical risk that cattle bone marrow could transmit BSE. SEAC explained that unless the government took action there was a 5% chance that one person in U.K. would contract CJD from beef on the bone in 1998.
Thus, no bones are to be sold for soup or even the family dog, even though the odds of contracting this form of BSE are roughly one in one billion. In other words, a Briton is about 100 times more likely to be struck by lightening, 4,000 times more likely to choke to death, 10,000 times more likely to be murdered, 40,000 times more likely to die on a football field or from ingesting carcinogens from eating potatoes or parsnips and 100,000 times more likely to die in a road accident than contract CJD from a rib of beef.
Fortunately the average Briton knows that beef is safe, which is why after Mr. Cunningham's latest ban he did not strike beef from the menu, but descended in droves upon butchers to buy up the last ribs and steaks in time for Christmas. My own butcher would not sell me a T-bone steak this week, not because he was concerned about becoming an outlaw, but because he had run out.
According to repeated news reports, butchers all over Britain are flouting the new law. The Daily Telegraph reported that Paul Robinson, a butcher from Andover in Hampshire, is prepared to risk the 6 months in jail and a $3,300 fine to sell boned beef.
Ludicrously, anyone will still be able to buy beef on the bone from wholesalers, simply by claiming to be in a catering company, or representing a pub or restaurant. These food "experts" are deemed by Blair's nanny government as capable of safely deboning and cooking meat, whereas the rest of the population is not.
Agricultural Protection
Given that the new law is not necessary to protect public health and that it is being widely ignored, the next question is why the Agriculture Department announced the ban at all. One possible explanation is that Mr. Cunningham is trying to show other EU farm ministers that he means business. In other words, he may have taken the extreme measure of prohibiting boned beef, as well as proposing a ban on EU beef, simply to encourage the lifting of the ban on British beef.
There is, as yet, little evidence to confirm this, but when British farmers were caught recently throwing imported meat into the sea at Holyhead port near Liverpool, Mr. Cunningham's reprimand was slow in coming.
It is too early to say whether the crisis is heading for resolution or escalation, but the latter could have serious economic ramifications. A U.S.-EU beef war could significantly undermine the liberalizations won--especially with regard to agriculture--during the last GATT round. This would be a disaster for the worlds' consumers. It would also impact developing countries (and Eastern Europe) as their economies are dominated by agricultural products that may be hindered by Western trade barriers. Now is the time for cooler heads to prevail, lest the madness spread.
Mr. Bate is an economist at Wolfson College, Cambridge University. He edited "What Risk? Science Politics and Public Health," which was published by Butterworth Heinemann.
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