Brazil’s beef production and export industry is once again under fire, the target of harsh criticism. Among those speaking out, a group of British and Irish Members of the European Parliament have just issued a petition calling for the European Commission to block imports from Brazil on grounds of unreliable traceability.
The Irish Farmers Association (IFA) had already sounded the alarm in July, upon returning from a trip to Brazil. In a press release subsequently reissued by COPA/COGECA1 , the IFA denounced grave shortcomings in animal identification and food safety controls. Flaws were observed in the foot-and-mouth disease control system and serious shortcomings discovered with regard to reporting animal transfers, particularly between Brazilian states that impose restrictions on exports and those that do not. Members of the IFA delegation also reported the use of hormones and growth accelerators that are banned in the European Union.
The Brazilian government was quick to issue assurances that all beef exported to the European Union complied with all health standards. It refuted all challenges to the credibility of the official controls carried out in Brazil and cited “market issues” as the true motivation behind the ban proposed by the Irish producers.
MEPs are currently rallying behind the Irish producers with a view to obtaining a response from the European Commission. As they see it, although foot-and-mouth disease is present in three regions of Brazil from which beef theoretically cannot be exported, beef from the other, supposedly sound, regions does not provide sufficient guarantees. “The Commission will have to listen to us” and must take “its head out of the sand on this issue (…) While at present we are imposing extremely high standards of food safety and traceability on our own farmers, we are allowing potentially dangerous beef to enter Europe freely,” stated Neil Parish, the British Conservative who spearheaded the written statement submitted to European parliamentarians for signature.
Most ironically, one week later, Brussels reinstated the ban on British beef, as always and once again for health reasons, as new cases of foot-and-mouth disease had been discovered in southeast England.
The international beef market is accustomed to these political/health crises, which dictate trade from one ban to the next.2 . Although international trade accounts for only ten percent of worldwide production, it determines prices, by placing diverse production systems with varying abilities to compete and disparate health and environmental standards into competition with one another.
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