The only reason the German farmer leader, Gerd Sonnleitner, a Bavarian, was now demanding that the EU ban be ignored and inoculations resumed, was that the losses stock farmers could now suffer would be many times greater than any lost export earnings. It's to be assumed, says the east German paper, that over the longer term the EU cannot resist the demand to resume inoculations. After all, it comments, the mass killings and incineration of animals offer a much too medieval picture of the condition of European farming. But inoculating cattle, sheep and pigs to keep them health is no permanent solution, either, the paper thinks. The only acceptable thing is healthy animals by healthy methods of keeping them.
Drugs have a place in the stalls only in exceptional circumstances.
Our approach has been to keep this accident from becoming an international incident. This accident has the potential of undermining our hopes for a fruitful and productive relationship between our two countries. President George Bush commenting about the landing of a US spy plane on a Chinese air base after it collided with a Chinese fighter plane. Berlin's Morgenpost sees the incident as a test case for US-Chinese relations. But it doesn't think it marks the start of a new cold war.