THE Minister for Agriculture will be in Brussels today for what could be a stormy meeting of MEPs in the face of claims that the European Commission has tried to suppress debate on the dangers of BSE.
The Commission has been accused of a systematic attempt since 1990 to play down the BSE issue in an attempt to protect the beef market.
The claims were made yesterday by the French daily paper Liberation on the basis of new leaks of internal memos from senior Commission officials.
The most telling, from the head of the Commission's agriculture directorate in 1993, Mr Guy Legras, appeals to his counterpart in the internal market directorate, Mr Ricardo Perissich, to prevent two scientific committees from discussing the possibility of transmission of BSE to humans.
"In my experience," Mr Legras wrote, "all discussion of BSE inevitably causes problems for the beef market. Last January we already had a scare because of a German TV programme, and it is only through prudence and discretion that we have been able to avoid controversy . . ."
"To keep the public reassured, it's essential that we ourselves should not reopen the debate. If you could help me, we would best be careful and avoid a discussion in the scientific committees."
Another leaked memo is from Ms Martine Reicherts, deputy chef de cabinet to the Commission President, Mr Jacques Santer, who then held the same position for the Luxembourg Agriculture Commissioner, Mr Rene Steichen. She asks an official to add a paragraph to a letter from her boss to the German Health Minister urging him not to raise the BSE issue again because "it has caused lots of fuss and damage to consumption".
The revelations by the paper's Brussels correspondent, Jean Quatremer, are particularly embarrassing to the Commission which had previously dismissed a 1990 memo leaked to the same paper on the same issue as the unrepresentative product of an official who was not even a Commission employee.
Liberation yesterday insisted all the memos reflected a common pattern of behaviour which went back to the pre 1993 Steichen era when Mr Ray MacSharry was Commissioner for Agriculture.
After the paper's first leak, MEPs set up a committee to inquire into the handling of BSE by the Commission. Its first meeting is this morning and its first witness Mr Yates, although he is likely to be only a warm up act for the Agriculture Commissioner, Mr Franz Fischler, this afternoon.
Mr Yates may face questions on why the Council of Agriculture Ministers, of which he is president until January, asked the Commission to put in place a BSE research programme in 1990 and did not press the Commission for research results; why it refused to adopt the precautionary principle in refusing to act until there was clear evidence of a link between BSE and CJD; and why it treated so lightly Britain's manifest inability to cut BSE in its herds even years after the feed issue was supposed to have been dealt with.
"The Commission has nothing to hide," its spokesman, Mr Klaus van der Pas, said yesterday. Sources in the Commission insisted its intention was not to suppress scientific evidence on BSE.
