This article is from page 38 of the 2007-12-11 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 38 JPG
IN what is being heralded as a major moral victory in the campaign to ban imports of Brazilian beef, the Oire- achtas Joint Committee on Agricul- ture last Thursday backed the Irish Farmers Association’s (IFA) Brazil- ian Beef plan.
The IFA plan received unanimous Support from the cross party com- mittee.
“The latest EU Commission Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) report on Brazil contains irrefutable evi- dence that Brazilian beef imports fail to meet EU standards on that critical animal health and consumer issues of Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) and traceability,” said IFA President,
Padriag Walshe, addressing the com- mittee.
“Commissioner Kyprianou now has the detailed evidence of serious deficiencies in Brazilian controls from his own veterinary experts. He cannot continue to expose the EU to unnecessary risks and has no choice but to impose a ban on Brazilian beef into Europe.”
Mr Walshe told the committee that the primary focus of the IFA cam- paign is about the failure of Brazil to meet European Union production standards and food safety controls.
He said there must be a level play- ing field on standards for European producers and the current policy of double standards on imports was un- tenable.
“In fact, if the Department of Ag- riculture found the Brazilian failures on an Irish farm, the animals would be destroyed and removed from the food chain; the farmer could face court proceedings, and a possible jail Sentence,” he continued.
The IFA President said the FVO report fully vindicates IFA’s own findings and our insistence that there should be a total ban on all Brazilian beef imports into Europe.
In the European Parliament in Oc- tober, the EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou stated, if the situation in Brazil did not improve, then ‘the EU will take the necessary action includ- ing the implementation of a ban on beef imports by the end of this year’.
In presenting the detail contained in the latest FVO report, Walshe said the Brazilian FMD controls are total- ly inadequate and their vaccination is haphazard, jeopardising certification of beef exports to the EU.
He said the Brazilian traceability and movement controls are a sham- bles. Regionalisation has failed and the FVO found “meat from an animal declared non-EU eligible formed part of a consignment exported to the EU’.
Environmentalists have linked the five-fold increase in beef exports from Brazil in recent years with the rapid destruction of the rainforests in the Pantanal and Amazon regions that is a major cause of global cli- mate change.