Beef sales have plummeted, and prices across the EU are down 17 per cent. When falling demand drives prices below a certain level in the EU, the Commission must buy and freeze, or export, any unwanted beef. No one is likely to want to eat this beef, Fischler conceded in announcing the proposals, and burning is cheaper than freezing. If this restores consumer confidence in beef, prices might also recover. In Britain, home of more than 90 per cent of all mad cows, no cattle older than 30 months have been eaten since 1996, when the disease was linked to new variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease in humans.
Younger cattle are less likely to be infectious.
But half of the 60 million cattle in continental Europe are dairy cows, which are eaten at an average age of six years. This is the ground up remains of livestock, including cattle, and is the main way BSE is transmitted. Britain bans it in all feed and the Commission will ask ministers to extend this ban to the EU on Monday. They are likely to. France and Germany have already done it, and Denmark and Austria have dropped the opposition that defeated previous proposals for an EU ban.