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Global Trade Reopened Along With Old Wounds

Posted on: Tuesday, 14 March 2006, 12:00 CST

The end of the beef export ban has not only reopened a global trade that was worth an estimated pounds 675m a year a decade ago, it has also reprised the confrontation between the farming industry and animal welfare campaigners over the live transport of veal calves to the Continent.

As the new co-operative Anglo European Farmers swung into operation with the aim of sending the first ferryload of dairy calves across the Channel next month, the Compassion in World Farming group warned of mass demonstrations.

CIWF transport campaigner Rowen West-Henzell said the trade was brutal and pointless.

'Scientific evidence shows that calves travel badly and if this trade resumes they will be sent on long and stressful journeys over land and sea, adding to the distress they feel after being taken away from their mothers,' she said. The group says only meat, not live animals, should be transported on journeys of more than eight hours. Live exports provoked mass protests at a number of ports in the 1990s, and one demonstrator, Jill Phipps, was accidentally crushed to death by a cattle lorry during an attempted blockade at Baginton airport near Coventry in 1995.

The trade was halted the following year when the export ban was imposed. The system of rearing calves in veal crates has since been banned in Britain and will be banned throughout the EU from the beginning of next year, but the campaigners say calves still face the prospect of long trips and being loaded into crates for fattening at their continental destinations at least until the end of this year.

Anglo European Farmers director Elwyn Morse, 44, a farmer and livestock dealer from Templeton, Pembrokeshire, said,

'It would be preferable to rear the calves nearer to the source but that's an ideal that does not work in practice. We tried it in Carmarthenshire four or five years ago and it just does not work. The calves grew well but the costs are too great.'

Mr Morse said dairy calves were an inevitable by-product of milk production.

'It's not fair for the calf to be shot in the farmyard or sold at market for a few pounds,' he said. 'I honestly feel it's a ghastly end to shoot a calf when it can serve a purpose and provide food, as long as it's done humanely and with compassion.' Mr Morse is one of two Welsh directors in the new company, along with Llyswen, Brecon, farmer David Owen. Mr Owen helped to rescue the collapsing export market for sheep in 1997 by opening up a trading route to Europe through a new shipping company, Farmers Ferry. It was controversial at first, but the operation led to marked improvements in the welfare of stock. When the ferry was halted because of the foot-and- mouth epidemic and new legislation on the movement of animals, Mr Owen and his partners formed Farmers Fresh which operates a refitted abattoir in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, processing 12,000 sheep weekly, 90% of which are exported to the Continent. Half the throughput is sourced from Welsh producers. Mr Owen, 57, has resigned as chief executive of Farmers Fresh and its holding company Farmers First to concentrate on the new company. The other two directors are Cheshire farmer David Faulkner, 52, who has 35 years' experience of the calf industry and has worked with the Dutch calf sector for 20 years, and Michele Kelly of Harrogate, former secretary of the National Livestock Traders Association. 'Animal welfare is imperative to us and with a farmers ferry we can ensure that the highest standards are maintained constantly,' she said.: Uphill battle:Bse was first identified in Britain in 1986, and the disease peaked in 1992 with 37,280 recorded cases. The beef ban was imposed by the European Commission four years later in response to growing public fears about the risk of BSE spreading to humans. Government efforts to crack down on the disease led to a limited resumption of some beef exports in 1999 - but they amounted to barely 1% of the British export market.

Last year the incidence of BSE fell to just 161 cases, and the Commission said its two key conditions for a total lifting of the British beef embargo had been met.

Those were that the number of BSE cases had to be below 200 per million adult animals annually - the level at which the World Organisation For Animal Health defines a country as at 'moderate risk' of BSE.

The second condition was a favourable inspection report from the EU Food and Veterinary Office confirming that UK monitoring and control measures against BSE met the requirements of the other EU member states.

Restoring lost export markets will be an uphill battle, and not all EU states are pleased to see the end of the ban. Since BSE was first identified in the UK, 185,000 cases of the disease have been confirmed, more than 95% of them before 2000.: Dairy farmers are asked to lend cash:Nearly 20,000 dairy farmers in Britain will receive a prospectus for Anglo European Farmers with their copy of the Milk Development Council's monthly magazine.

They will be asked to buy a pounds 1 share in the new company together with a one-off levy of pounds 3 for every cow on their farm in milk production.

The AEF directors say this payment will be regarded as a loan to be repaid when co-op reserves reach a sufficient level.

Dairy calves are currently fetching as little as pounds 1 at market and averaging around pounds 4.

The company says the same calf fetches around 200 euros - about pounds 140 - at calf collection centres on the continent.

Source: Western Mail

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