Dead pigs fed to hens as Brussels axes BSE ban
EUROCRATS are to allow farmers to feed their chickens DEAD PIGS as they lift a ban imposed after the BSE crisis.
The ban on farm feed made of animal remains, introduced during the BSE crisis, is to end in the EU to allow cheap pig protein to be fed to chickens over fears European farmers are being undercut by lower standards elsewhere.
The change to the regulations comes into force in August following a last-ditch attempt by a coalition of MEPs, led by the Greens, which failed to kill the policy.
EU member states have already endorsed the regulation, with only France and Ireland abstaining.
Horrors
The use of processed animal protein (PAP) from mammals in the feed of cattle and sheep was banned by the EU in 1994 as the full horrors of BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, emerged.
The first case of BSE was reported in 1986 in the UK. The disease was spread widely by farmers feeding cattle with the meat and bone meal of dead and infected animals.
More than four million cattle were slaughtered in the UK and 178 people died after contracting the human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which was understood to be passed along by consuming infected beef.
The European Commission has informed MEPs that there was no health risk from allowing PAP from pigs and insects to be fed to poultry, the feeding of pigs with chicken PAP, or the use of gelatine and collagen from sheep and cattle being fed to other farmed animals.
The change was said to be necessary to allow EU farmers to operate by the same standards as those exporting into the union.
A ban on both the use of PAP in feed to cows and sheep and on ‘intra species recycling’, otherwise known as cannibalism, will remain in force.
The regulation was agreed by the member states in April, leaving MEPs three months to scrutinise the text and raise an objection before it came into force.
Piernicola Pedicini, an Italian MEP in the Greens group, had sought to build a majority on the parliament’s environment committee to record an objection, but his efforts were in vain.
The UK continues to ban the use of PAP in the feed of farm animals. A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “The UK is committed to maintaining the highest animal welfare and biosecurity standards and following our departure from the EU there is no legal obligation for us to implement any of these changes.”