"Products that are a part of life" is the slogan of Saria BioIndustries, one of Germany's largest producers of meat-and-bone meal. The company's products don't belong to life in Germany any more, however, since the federal government imposed a total ban on meat-and-bone meal last weekend.
After the first two cases of BSE were discovered in German-born cattle almost two weeks ago the government finally admitted it had been deluding itself into thinking Germany was BSE-free.
The public felt conned and, to compensate, the government over-compensated. In just one week it formulated, debated and enacted an indefinite blanket ban on meat-based meal - one of the fastest pieces of legislating in the history of post-war Germany. Only now are the implications of the shotgun legislation starting to become apparent. Saria Bio-Industries has 22 factories around Europe producing bone meal, 12 of them in Germany.
Last year the company's German operations had a turnover of DM200 billion. Now it finds itself with a product it cannot sell.
In Germany the sale of meat-and-bone meal was, until last week, still widespread, with over 700,000 tonnes sold last year. Now Germany's agriculture ministry has asked energy utilities and concrete manufacturers to consider burning the meal in their furnaces.
RWA Power, an energy utility based in Essen, built special incinerators for just that task and incinerated 1,600 tonnes of French meal in 1998. Now the company plans to accept German meal, but at a price. It is estimated that firms may charge up to DM700 per tonne of meal incinerated.
It will cost DM1.7 billion to dispose of Germany's existing mountain of meat-based meal. Producers say they face ruin in the long term.
"The ban is as good as unenforceable, because we will have to continue to produce meat-based meal even if it is no longer legal to sell or export," says Dr Manfred Brunner, president of the Meat Meal Industry Federation.
If meal manufacture stops, "the slaughterhouses have to stop accepting animals for slaughter, with the end result of dead animals left lying in the farmyards," he says.
Today Germany's agriculture minister, Mr Karl-Heinz Funke, will attempt to work out a compensation plan with meal manufacturers.
They remain worried because, although the ban on their product is indefinite, the compensation is not.
