On August 1st, three years and five months after the EU banned the export of all British beef because of BSE contamination, it will be allowed back on world markets, the European Commission agreed yesterday.
The lifting of the ban, confirmation of a decision taken in principle by EU farm ministers in November, closes an extraordinarily expensive chapter in the inglorious history of industrialised agriculture - said to have cost British farmers about £1.5 billion. Exports to a beef market once worth around £600 million a year are expected to resume only slowly.
The Commission decision was carefully circumscribed. Only deboned beef from cattle born after August 1996 will be allowed through. This date-based export scheme is also secured by massively tightened traceability procedures whose implementation Commission inspectors have verified.
"We are convinced that British beef is safe," the Agriculture Commissioner, Mr Franz Fischler, told the BBC yesterday.
The BSE scare broke in November, 1986, when bovine spongiform encephalopathy was first identified in two cows from different parts of England. It turned into an epidemic which peaked in 1993 when more than 1,000 new cases were recorded every week. At first confined to the UK, the eruption of the problem has been linked to the dismantling, by the Conservative government, of animal feedstuff regulations which then allowed cattle to be fed meat and bone meal which had been insufficiently heat-treated.
Although Britain officially stopped feeding meat and bone meal to cattle in June, 1988, the first case was found of BSE in cattle (born after the ban) in March, 1991, evidence of widespread failures to implement the ban.
Scientists also established what they believed to be a prima-facie case that linked BSE to a fatal human wasting disease of the nervous system, new variant CJD. So far, 40 people have died from the condition.
In March, 1996, the EU imposed its worldwide ban on beef exports from Britain.
Yesterday, Mr Ben Gill, president of the National Farmers' Union, said the EU's move was a huge boost for the beef industry: "August 1st will mark a watershed for British beef farmers and we intend to celebrate".
But he said the industry's problems were far from over.
"No one can pretend that simply reopening our export channels will undo all the damage which has been done, and indeed it is too late for many," he said.
The British Agriculture Secretary, Mr Nick Brown, said the date-based export scheme and the regulation that requires all exported beef to be deboned would help persuade consumers abroad of the high quality and safety standards of British beef. But he added that he hoped the domestic beef-on-the-bone ban could be lifted soon.
