Irate farmers to protest EU 'high-risk' label
By : Juliet D. Golden
This is madness: The EU's Gunter Verheugen inspects cattle on a farm near Bialystok.
Farmers groups are slated to rally outside the European Commission (EC) offices in Warsaw this week to protest the European Union's (EU) labeling of Poland as a high-risk country for the appearance of so-called mad cow disease.
"We can't allow someone from abroad to say in such an authoritative way that Polish farmers produce infected beef," said Arkadiusz Bojarun, spokesman for the National Union of Farmers Cooperatives and Agricultural Organizations (KR). "We know those farmers, and we know there is a difference between the way animals are raised here and in the EU."
Last week the government announced that in a recent report, the EU's scientific steering committee found that agriculture practices in Poland over the last decade have not only put cattle at risk of contracting mad cow disease, but that chances are the country's herd is already infected.
Large imports of meat and bone meal (MBM) and cattle from EU countries where BSE has been discovered are the chief reasons used to back the findings.
Farmers unions weren't alone in criticizing the report.
"This text is biased," said Jacek Szymanderski, spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry. "It hasn't been proven that we've fed cattle feed containing MBM."
Animal feed made with MBM is widely considered by experts as the most likely cause of BSE in cattle. BSE has been linked to Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome, the human form of the disease that has led to close to 100 deaths in Western Europe. Poland claims that animal feed containing MBM was exclusively used to feed pigs and poultry.
"I think that this is a political move," said Jan Ciesielski, president of the Wielkopolska Gielda Rolno-Ogrodnicza (WGRO), a wholesale agriculture market in Poznan. "If there had been one case (of BSE) discovered here we could say OK, let's wait and see what happens, but nothing's been found here and they're doing that."
Government officials and farmers are hoping to force the EU to repeal the high-risk label. Farmers fear that if the label remains, countries outside the EU could close their doors to Polish beef. They also say the label could be a stain on Poland's ag sector as a whole.
"Other countries might say, 'Why should we take your beef if the EU doesn't want it, you are in the same category as countries like France or England where BSE already exists,' " Bojarun said.
Poland exports about 35,000 tonnes of beef according to the foreign agriculture markets monitoring unit FAMMU/FAPA in the Agriculture Ministry.
In the immediate aftermath of last week's announcement, farmers called for a boycott of EU food products.
"If the EU is treating us this way and closing their markets to us, then we don't see why Poles should buy products from the EU when we know that Polish products are healthy," Bojarun said. "It's not about sanctions, it's more about calling for a reaction of Solidarity on the part of Poles (because) Polish goods are healthy and they are produced by Polish farmers."
Poland's Foreign Affairs Ministry last week also stepped into the fray in an attempt to urge the EU to reconsider its findings. The ministry wrote in a statement: "The decision to include Poland (in the group of high-risk countries), is discriminatory and could cause significant difficulties for Polish exports to both the EU and third-party countries and could negatively impact the image of Poland."
While the news elicited a harsh response on the part of the government and farmers alike, some animal rights activists applauded the EU's findings. "They are defending EU consumers," said Marek Kryda, an animal rights activist.
According to Kryda, poor levels of veterinary and sanitary controls at Poland's borders in recent years mean that Poland's cattle herd could have been exposed to both BSE and any number of other infectious diseases.
Kryda cited a Supreme Board of Inspection (NIK) report released last summer that harshly criticized Poland's veterinary services for slack controls at its borders.
The report stated that out of 39 border crossings in Poland, only four had 24-hour sanitary controls. In addition, the report found that border crossings were not equipped with the infrastructure necessary to carry out careful controls.
"The import to Poland of goods without veterinary control presented a danger of the transfer of infectious diseases to animals and dangerous substances to human health," the NIK report read.
