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Mr. Ross: Yes. We have a quality assurance scheme that can be built upon. In those circumstances, the danger of beef from a non-beef herd getting into the food chain is minimal.
We also export 80 per cent. of the beef that we produce, and 50 per cent. of our meat goes to continental Europe. I drew the Minister's attention to the fact that recently much of the exported meat was sent back. It was sent back from Holland, where supermarkets had decided to sell beef from Northern Ireland in preference to beef produced in their own country. They would take our beef again tomorrow, but their Government will not let them. That beef is back in Northern Ireland sitting in cold stores, which is appalling. As a result, the freezers are full, and all the beef producers' yards in Northern Ireland are full of cattle.
The cattle are, as we say, eating their heads off and enjoying life very much, when quite a number of them should be on the hook. That reservoir of cattle will get bigger and bigger with every passing week and the cattle
must be slaughtered because there will not be the feed in the silage pit or in the fields in a month or six weeks' time to keep them. Every practising farmer knows that.
Government support will be needed for the abattoirs and the freezers. It will also be badly needed to move the cattle off the farms in large numbers. Food stocks are dropping fast, which is creating a great difficulty.
We have heard some chat about Northern Ireland having separate status. I noticed in the media some crack about the Ulster Unionist population saying that they wanted all-Irish beef status. That was not true. The only party in Northern Ireland that asked for all-Ireland status was Sinn Fein. Even the SDLP did not particularly want that because it knew that it would annoy its friends in Dublin. It was a pleasure to see someone becoming a Unionist, if only to avoid annoying his friends.
I support the idea of separate regional status for all sorts of things. It was raised earlier at Question Time. We should promote what we can produce well from the various regions. It is too late to do that in this instance; it is not a way out of the present crisis. That would not be acceptable to Europe. All the United Kingdom must sink or swim together. I wish the Minister well in his war with Europe, because a war he is going to have.
Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman (Lancaster):
First,I must declare an interest as a farmer, albeit one who, sadly, no longer has stock. I wish I had. As a dairymaid in my youth, I loved stock, and still do.
In all my years in politics, I can recall no more depressing period than the past two weeks concerning the tragedy--I cannot call it less--of BSE and CJD. I have never spent a more depressing morning than last Friday morning at Lancaster auction.
The disaster affects not just farmers but the whole community. The impact of the crisis is so great that the health of the rural economy of substantial parts of Britain, including my own, is in peril. As one of my sensible constituents, Mrs. Gardner of Scorton, put it:
She signed herself:
How right she is.
Yesterday, I attended the joint meeting of the Select Committees on Health and Agriculture, which interrogated the Secretary of State for Health, the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and their most senior and best-qualified advisers on health and veterinary matters as well as representatives of the CJD surveillance unit. As the Secretary of State told the Committee:
That is very true, and the Prime Minister reiterated those sentiments at Question Time today.
The Government have meticulously followed all the scientific advice given to them, and I share the Minister's view that British beef is perfectly safe. I certainly continue to eat it, as do all my family, who are now old enough to make their own decisions and do not just follow mum's advice.
A remarkably small number of so-called experts have managed thoroughly to alarm people both here and abroad, although they have not taken in some of the country dwellers. As a lady from Pilling put it:
and as one of my constituents from Garstang put it:
I agree, but unfortunately the media hype and twaddle have had a catastrophic affect on the public mind.
I greatly sympathise with the chief medical officer, who said yesterday, rather ruefully, that the risk is extremely low, that there may be no risk at all, and that there is no evidence of a link between BSE and CJD. He went on to say that there are many thousands of scientists here and in the United States, and in other parts of the world, who are conducting research on the matter, but the media interview only three of them. We can all remember who those three are. They make a highly lucrative living by scaring the living daylights out of people, but they flatly refuse to subject their theories to analysis by their scientific peers.
As the Secretary of State for Health said yesterday, the argument moved on on Tuesday. All over the country, the market for beef has collapsed. On Friday, at Lancaster market, just 37 cull cows were put forward as against the usual number of between 150 and 200. Those cows sold were between £100 and £150 down. By Monday, instead of between 150 and 180 beef animals being traded, just five went to market, of which four were sold and the other had to be taken home. It is imperative that action is taken to reverse that collapse. Farmers cannot hold their beef animals beyond their proper maturity or they will run to fat and be downgraded. Apart from that, after a dry summer, the farmers do not have the fodder to do so.
The aim must be to restore confidence in the least wasteful way. It would be criminal, in a world short of food, to advocate a wholesale slaughter policy. However, cull cows from the dairy herd and old cows from the beef suckler herd, which have passed their useful breeding life, and are presented for slaughter, could be removed from the food chain and incinerated. I dread, however, the uproar that will ensue when the burning starts, because existing incinerators will be quite unable to cope with the influx of animals. I am old enough to remember the 1954 foot and mouth outbreak, when one could smell a herd that had been destroyed for many, many miles.
Proper compensation must be paid, and we are fully entitled to demand that the European Community, which aggravated the panic by its ban, should bear half the costs. Those measures should restore confidence, but the next meeting of the European Union vets should be brought forward from the proposed six weeks to two to reconsider that ban.
How do we gauge that confidence has been restored? As one of my colleagues half-jokingly observed last night: "If McDonald's think the measures are adequate, and resume their policy of buying British beef, the British public will follow suit."
Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire):
I begin by quoting from a letter that I received this afternoon from James Aspinall, a farmer in my constituency:
the House will understand that I am quoting--
I hope that what the Minister said tonight will reassure him somewhat on that. He continued:
The two strands of the BSE problem run side by side: the scientific evidence--uncertain in some areas--of the transmission or otherwise of BSE, including its relationship to CJD, and the public perception of the risk and the reaction of the media and of Europe. Unfortunately, the two strands cannot be separated, much as the Government, and perhaps all hon. Members, would wish that all decisions on BSE were taken on scientific grounds alone.
The Minister said in opening the debate that measures may have to be taken that go beyond scientific evidence, confirming the National Consumer Council's briefing that said that it has always argued that the Government should follow the precautionary principle and take all necessary measures to protect public health. Such an approach involved taking precautionary measures "beyond available scientific evidence".
The difficulty we face has been compounded by the peculiar way in which the Government have dealt with the announcements in the past week and a half.To announce last week that a different strain of CJD had been identified caused a public panic about beef. It was followed by a weekend hugger-mugger of the relevant scientists to discuss the issue--the public knowing full well that the scientists had been working on the issue for a decade.
Over the weekend, the Minister talked on television--rightly--of not ruling out anything, including mass slaughter. Within a week, the Secretary of State for Health had announced that everything seemed to be okay as far as the scientists were concerned. While I commend Ministers on their openness with the House in the past week or so, I must say that no tactic could have been better devised to inflate public concern than the way in which the matter has been handled.
The public alarm is totally understandable. It is no use Conservative Members blaming the press, the Labour party or whomever they can find--apart from themselves--as the Prime Minister did today. Nor is it at all surprising that our European partners reacted with similar alarm to that of the British people--I would have been surprised if they had not. Had the situation been reversed, I can easily imagine the delight with which some
Conservative Members would have rushed to demand a boycott and, in some senses, they have been doing that this evening. The vilification of European beef--justified or otherwise--would simply result in people in this country not eating beef at all, whether it was British, Belgian or whatever.
In common with most hon. Members, I am not a scientist. It is therefore fairly simple for the Government to tell me, and all of us, that we must rely on scientific information. Unfortunately, not all the scientists agree. Those who have been sounding alarms for many years about BSE have been brushed to one side, branded as bonkers and--in one case, at least--sacked. The Government must realise that, although they rightly have confidence in the scientists on SEAC to whom they listen, the public also listen to scientists who differ--even when their views might be apocalyptic.
Many people in this country suspect science and scientists--even more, they suspect Government. They fear cover-ups and vested interests that appear at times to control public policy-making. When the public hear hon. Members declaring loudly that British beef is totally safe or that British beef is the best in the world because they have tried beef from all other countries, or when they hear hon. Members declaring that they will eat more beef--as the hon. Member for Congleton (Mrs. Winterton) has recently done--metaphorically, they count the spoons.
Comparisons of risk with road accidents or smoking are interesting, but totally irrelevant. There is something creepily awful about suspecting the food one eats, and suspecting that it might contain a poison that one cannot see. We are talking not about consequences amounting to something like flu, but about an incurable fatal disease.
Numerous questions must be addressed, and some have been by the Minister this evening. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East (Dr. Strang) detailed the errors of the past. I will not go through them again, but there are questions to be asked. Why did the Government reject the recommendations of the Tyrrel committee and of the Select Committee in 1990 that there should be random checks of animals at slaughter? That has been raised before this evening, and it seems to be the most obvious and simple thing that should have been done.
A distinguished farmer in my constituency, Jim Heyes from Mossborourgh farm, wrote:
That is a good question. He added:
I do not know the answer to that. Why has the regime in slaughterhouses been so lax that, last September, 48 per cent. of them were failing to handle SBOs correctly? What work has been done into the possible consequences of that for public health? Why was Haresh Nareng's proposed test for BSE in live animals not thoroughly tried out, instead of being pushed on one side? Why has there never been any testing of slurry-treated land where BSE has been found?
The joint Select Committee was told yesterday that scientists were not sure about the zero risk of BSE in muscle and that it might be one in a million. We have to remember that we have a population of more than50 million, so that is a substantial increase in risk.
Why do we not know the reason for the incidence of CJD being much higher among dairy farmers, not merely in this country but abroad? Why were we told that
mechanically recovered meat was banned in December, when it was only the mechanically recovered meat from the spinal cord? Why do we not know whether infected animals--or how many--were passed into the food chain during the period of the 50 per cent. compensation? Why do we not know whether infected animals were buried during those years in the late 1980s? Why have the questions of my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mr. Campbell-Savours) about possible cross-infection in the mid-1990s not been answered? Perhaps they cannot be.
Those matters and many others--most vitally perhaps the fact that there is still uncertainty about transmissibility between mother and offspring--are all lodged in the public mind, and reassurance on statistical grounds will not suffice. Clearly, putting the consumers' worries to rest is not going to be easy. Distrust of beef products will probably remain as a folk memory for a long time. In restoring some confidence, so that the industry can survive and rebuild, I do not believe that the Government can overreact. The proposals for slaughter suggested by the National Farmers Union and the Country Landowners Association seem to be a minimum that would start the process of rebuilding.
The regime at slaughterhouses and on farms must be draconian, and must be seen to be so. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, East proposed a quality assurance scheme. The situation is so desperate that that must not only be the case, but we must not put aside the idea of creating a statutory beef regime to ensure that all the power of Parliament is seen to be behind that quality assurance. The public must be clearly informed about the presence of bovine products in other foodstuffs. Many of us have been astonished, however well up we might be on these matters, to find out how extensive is the use of such products, which are in all sorts of things, such as sweets and biscuits.
The penalties for ignoring or flouting the regulations must be seen by the public to be harsh and effective. Moreover, whatever action is taken, it must be taken swiftly. Every day that passes means more jobs, more confidence and more exports lost and that may lose us the co-operation and support of the European Commission, which we seem to be starting to enjoy.
There is an awful lot to learn from this episode about the wider concerns of the public--
"The whole country must recognise that farmers, producers, meat processors and abattoir workers are also parents and consumers, and this is not an 'us and them' situation and calls for a united front and joint action."
"Mother of five children, consumer and farmer, in that order."
"The best available evidence demonstrates that British beef and beef products can be safely eaten by consumers both here and around the world. The question now is a matter of consumer confidence. It is one thing to have a safe product; it is another to command confidence in the marketplace."
28 Mar 1996 : Column 1264
"It is a lot of media hype",
"It is a lot of twaddle".
"I am an arable and beef farmer who farms at Gt. Altcar in West Lancashire.
Could you please ask this Douglas Hogg"--
"why he has not put some confidence into the beef industry and ordered the slaughter of these old milk cows which can carry BSE?"
"I have never had BSE on my farm and feel I am being victimised with the total collapse of price at auction markets. I feel abandoned by the Government."
"As all brains etc are removed from carcasses are they tested for BSE before disposal? . . . If not why not?"
"Cattle which die on the farm are normally sent to the knacker. Are brains etc removed from these carcasses?"
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