Taxpayers face a bill of more than £400 million next year to implement the EU test-or-destroy scheme to deal with the problem of BSE, it has emerged. The cost of destroying a million animals aged over 30 months was described yesterday as "frightening" by the chairman of the Irish Meat Association, Mr Michael Behan.
He was addressing a rally of beef farmers organised by the Irish Farmers Association at Goffs, Kill, Co Kildare, when he warned that a full cull of over 30 month animals was not in the interests of beef farmers or meat processors.
"We are looking at slaughtering one million cattle or an alternative cull of 400,000 cows. The logistics of the exercise is frightening," he said. "The cost is also frightening. We estimate that it will cost £400 million to implement the plan next year. That cost would be borne by the national Exchequer."
The EU has decided that it will meet 70 per cent of the cost of compensating the farmer for the price of an animal, but the additional cost of killing, removing risk material, transport, rendering, storing and incinerating would fall on the taxpayer.
However, an alternative solution to slaughtering healthy animals over 30 months was given to the meeting, which was attended by upwards of 3,000 farmers, by Dr Patrick Wall, head of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.
Dr Wall urged farmers to look on the slaughter scheme as an amnesty and to use it to take out older cows which they knew had been fed contaminated meat-and-bone meal before 1996.
"Go after the cows that you feel might have been fed meat-and-bone meal when they were young. There are records there from the mills and your own records will tell you. Any of you who have fed pig and poultry feed to young calves or meat-and-bone meal which was legally or illegally imported from Northern Ireland, identify those older animals and bring them for slaughter," he said.
"Ask not what the Department of Agriculture can do for you," he told the audience, "but ask yourselves what you can now do for yourselves."
Taxpayers would be looking for value for their £400 million and they would expect that for that kind of money, BSE would be eliminated from the herd.
"We in Ireland are the only country in the world that has now confined this disease to older animals and we are within striking distance of eradicating BSE," he said.
The IFA president, Mr Tom Parlon, told the farmers that they had to lobby for a compensation price of 90p a lb for animals slaughtered under the test or destruct scheme.
That figure would mean that farmers, who were suffering severe loss of earnings from the crisis, could break even and stay in the business. Failure to achieve this would drive many of the specialist beef farmers out of business for good.