 |
EU to Use 971 Million Euro to Deal With Mad Cow Crisis
European Commission said Wednesday it will spend a fresh funding of 971 million euro (US$893 million) to deal with crisis of mad cow disease, or BSE.
"Now the agricultural expenditures are at the ceiling. Necessary new measures must be financed out of savings," European Union (EU)'s budget commissioner Michaele Schreyer told a regular news briefing at the EU headquarters.
She has presented the first 2001 Supplementary and Amending Budget (SAB) that provides for additional financing not foreseen in the 2001 budget to deal with the BSE crisis: market support, destruction of animals older than 30 months and extra co-financing for BSE tests.
The SAB will be financed from the surplus of the previous budget year. The EU's agricultural expenditures now sum up a bit more than 44 billion euro (some US$40 billion) in 2001, more than 7.44 percent on 2000.
Under this proposal, 700 million euro (US$644 million) will be used in a destruction scheme for animals older than 30 months which cannot enter the food chain, 238 million euro (US$219 million) will be used for market intervention in the beef meat market and 33 million euro (US$30 million) will be spent in the co-financing of the BSE tests.
The latest BSE scare took hold as a number of EU countries found new cases and an incident in France where potentially contaminated meat was found in supermarkets.
As more evidence emerges that the brain-wasting disorder, linked to the human version, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (nvCJD), has spread beyond the EU, governments in Europe are struggling to cope with consumer panic and the collapse of the beef trade.
The EU's annual farm budget of about 40 billion euro (US$37 billion) swallows around half of all EU centralized expenditure. European Commission has urged EU member states to take advantage of the so-called purchase for destruction scheme, a special six-month program that pays farmers to have their older cattle destroyed.
In This Section
|