IFA response:The Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) has accused Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan of "passing the buck" when it comes to the risk of foot-and-mouth disease posed by Brazilian beef imports to the EU.
Speaking after an emergency meeting of the IFA's national officers in Dublin yesterday, the association's president, Pádraig Walshe, said such imports represented an "accident waiting to happen".
While expressing the hope that Britain's foot-and-mouth outbreak had been contained in the Pirbright area of Surrey, Mr Walshe said Ms Coughlan was "negligent" in not calling for an outright ban on Brazilian imports to the EU. This was because the "buck" stopped with her, he said.
Earlier, Ms Coughlan had told RTÉ that matters of food safety fell under the remit of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), not her department.
She said the British authorities had identified that the incidence of foot-and-mouth in Britain appeared to be from a 1967 strain of the disease, which is not found anywhere else in the world.
But Mr Walshe claimed that foot-and-mouth was "endemic" in South America.
"I think it's unacceptable for the Minister to be passing on the responsibility to anybody else," he said. "The buck stops with the Minister and I'd like to see a situation where the Minister goes to the EU Commission and calls for a ban on Brazilian imports into the community."
He continued: "We've had one outbreak in the UK, and immediately we ban all meat imports from the UK . . . And yet, as a trading block, we in the EU are taking these imports from South America, from Brazil, where we know foot-and-mouth is endemic the whole time."
Foot-and-mouth and the importation of Brazilian beef were not two separate issues, Mr Walshe added. Perhaps fears about the impact on inflation were behind the Government's failure to seek a ban on Brazilian imports, but the risk of another outbreak was too high a price to pay for an industry worth more than €2 billion a year here, he said.
"The whole import of meats from South America is an accident waiting to happen," he said.
"We operate the highest standards in the world for our own farmers internally, and rightly so . . . but we're operating the lowest standards in the world for our imports. No other trading bloc operates standards as low as we do."
A spokesman for Ms Coughlan said she had previously raised at EU level the issue of how food production standards and costs in the EU compare with non-EU producers. In a recent report, the commission's food and veterinary office had also examined the IFA's concerns about Brazilian beef.
The IFA says that, as the commission is due to visit the country in the autumn, a precautionary ban should be put in place until it is satisfied that any problems are rectified.
However, Michael O'Mahony, chief specialist in veterinary public health with the FSAI, told The Irish Times that, while the FSAI does not define EU food policy, a range of measures are in place to ensure the safety of non-EU beef.
These include a requirement that only meat from certain foot-and-mouth free zones within a non-EU country can be imported, the fact that only fresh beef is permitted and the fact that no beef on the bone can be imported from these countries.
He added that, under international trade rules, a country has to declare where it has evidence of foot-and-mouth. These zones are "clearly known and clearly identified", he said. During the 2001 outbreak, IFA members benefited from this approach when the Cooley peninsula in Co Louth - rather than the entire country - was zoned in this way, he noted.