Government undecided on Irish meat imports

JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Agriculture Soleh Solahuddin said on Monday his office has not decided whether it would allow meat imports from Ireland to enter the country.

The minister said the decision would hinge on the report of a fact-finding team, which recently visited Ireland to study the prospects of importing Irish meat.

"We are currently waiting for the report from the special team. If the team concludes that Irish meat is unhygienic or hazardous, especially with regard to mad cow disease, we will cancel the plan," Soleh said at a hearing with House Commission III for agriculture and food affairs.

Soleh said the government had been studying the plan carefully.

"So please be objective in this matter and do not intimidate people with bombastic statements. First, they were bombarded by the dioxin scare, now with mad cow disease," he said, referring to the scare of dioxin-contaminated dairy products last month.

The ministry's Director General of Animal Husbandry, Erwin Soetirto, said Irish meat was cheaper because it was subsidized by the Irish government.

He said imported beef from Ireland could be sold for Rp 13,000 per kilogram here, cheaper than Australian meat, which was sold for Rp 18,000 per kilogram.

Members of the House Commission criticized the government's plan, saying the move would carry too great a risk of spreading mad cow disease, which can spread to humans and could kill off the local cattle industry.

"The United States is still imposing a ban on the import of cattle, meat and other husbandry products from Europe to prevent mad cow disease spreading to this country. Why should we risk ourselves by importing the Irish meat?" said Golkar legislator Elyas.

Another legislator, who requested anonymity, said political maneuvering was behind support for the Irish importation. He said a company set to import the Irish beef is owned by a former senior official at the Ministry of Agriculture.

Soleh, however, denied the allegation, and said the plan was based on pure business considerations.

"The Irish government has only offered the subsidized meat to Indonesia and the Philippines, because they know that we are still in a deep crisis. We haven't decided anything, we are just studying the possibility," he said.

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, popularly known as mad cow disease was first detected in 1985. It damages the brain, causing cattle to stagger and drool. There is no known cure.

The disease has resulted in the slaughter of thousands of cattle in Britain and abroad and has severely damaged Britain's beef industry. An export ban, which is still in force, was imposed in March 1995 on British cattle by the European Union, after an outbreak in Britain.

The ban was implemented after scientists identified a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a human brain-wasting ailment which they said could be contracted by eating infected beef.

In its latest report on the crisis over mad cow disease or BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), the commission said there had been 175,772 cases of the disease in the EU -- 99.7 percent of them in Britain.

The commission said that so far 30 people had died from the disease, 29 of them in Britain and one in France.(gis)