French beef ban may rebound,
- as Gallic defiance threatens EU credibility.
- October 22, 2001
This Opinion is featured in the November 2001 issue of the Anglia Farmer and Contractor
An interim decision by the advocate-general of the European Court of Justice says the mad cow disease-related ban imposed by France in 1999 on British beef imports is unlawful.
How France reacts to this, and any subsequent rulings of the court, could have very serious implications for World Trade Organization (WTO) agricultural trade negotiations due to reopen next February.
Back in 1996 the European Union imposed a ban on British cattle and beef exports when BSE was implicated in the emergence of a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a very rare but fatal human illness.
Subsequently Britain was able to negotiate terms for the lifting of this ban. They included establishing an identity preservation Date-Based Export Scheme for tracing beef and a passport-based system for cattle identification.
These measures were in essence a failsafe to supplement the British programmes for rendering of all beef from cattle over 30 months of age and the immediate slaughter of all cattle in the same age cohort in BSE infected herds. These programmes ensured no BSE infected beef entered consumption channels. By 1999 Britain had met these requirements and the EU lifted its ban in August.
France, and initially Germany, chose to ignore this decision. In October the EU scientific steering committee - chaired by a Frenchman - unanimously ruled that there was no justification for the French ban. Following several unsuccessful diplomatic initiatives the EU commission started legal action against France in the European Court of Justice in January 2000.
The French position was originally based on the advice of the then newly established French Food Safety Agency, which questioned the validity of the safety assurances in the British Date Based Export Scheme and the possibility of a new and unknown route for BSE infection. These grounds had already been refuted by the EU scientific steering committee.
In court, the French defence changed. As France had no beef tracing system itself, it was argued, the failsafe was not effective there. Like most other member states, France had neglected to set up programmes to meet a 1997 EU directive on traceability. EU case-law has established that a member state cannot claim that a EU measure is unlawful when it has failed to apply the measure itself.
Quite why the French chose this defence, which they must surely have known was flawed in a case-law context, will probably only emerge if and when the initial opinion is confirmed by the full court and France reacts to the final decision. Confirmation of an opinion occurs in about 80 per cent of cases.
This legal ruling aside, the French persistence in this case seems quite extraordinary from this side of the channel. In 2000, at the urging of the EU, member states instituted testing for BSE which revealed that the incidence of the disease at this time was probably higher in Europe than it was in Britain.
As European countries had no programmes for ensuring BSE-infected beef did not enter the food chain, European consumers were almost certainly more at risk in eating their own beef than British beef. The reality was that the French were excluding potentially safer beef from their markets on food safety grounds.
Paris has shown no inclination to quietly lift the ban and save further embarrassment, even though it means little at this time as all livestock and meat exports from Britain are subject to foot and mouth disease restrictions.
The reason for the French "resistance" is, of course, political. Conveniently a recent public poll by the French producer group ANIA found that French consumers believe British food is the most unsafe in Europe, while, you've guessed it, food produced in France is of the highest quality.
The EU has in the past been accused, and found guilty, of using food safety issues as a means of protecting domestic markets, as with the WTO dispute with North America over beef from cattle treated with growth hormones.
The BSE dispute between the UK and France further emphasizes the challenges for future WTO deliberations. Among the most serious of these is the degree to which the EU can be viewed as representing its member states when it is being defied in such a flagrant manner on an issue critical to negotiations.
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