Scotch beef and lamb labels 'safe' from WTO

Published on Tuesday 21 June 2005 01:07

FORTY one of Europe's specific product quality labels, such as Parmesan cheese, are under threat in World Trade Organisation negotiations.

But Scotch beef and lamb, recently granted protected geographical identification (PGI) status are not among them.

That's a relief, according to Jim Walker, chairman of Quality Meat Scotland, as he listened to the assurance from Isabelle Peutz, head of the European Union's agricultural products quality policy.

Peutz, on the first day of an international beef quality conference organised by QMS in Edinburgh, admitted that negotiations about 41 of several hundred products designated PGI or protected designation of origin (PDO) would be difficult.

At WTO level, the US and several trade blocs outside Europe see the designations as strangling free trade when their equivalents can be produced elsewhere in the world while European farmers want to hang on to as many as possible because quality labels are worth an estimated €5 billion a year in added value. "We can't be too optimistic," she said, "as we try to save some of the most pirated names, notably Parmesan. But Scotch beef is safe."

At least it is probably safe, because it is not on the list of imitated products under threat, notably and most unlikely, Newcastle Brown Ale.

Walker, who sees the high-profile conference - opened by the Princess Royal, under ferociously tight security, with speakers and delegates from 21 countries - as a marker for Scotland's re-entry to the beef export market by the end of this year, said: "It is good news for us that Scotch beef's quality label is safe. The PGI has under-pinned the brand and the way we have raised awareness of it in the past two years.

"It will be vital when we return to the EU market because the brand is what sells us abroad."

There is optimism that a return of sorts towards a beef export trade that was worth 125 million a year to Scotland before the March 1996 anti-BSE ban on exports and consumption of beef from cattle over 30 months old could be by the end of this year.

A first step would be a favourable report from European officials checking Britain's anti-BSE measures, a second, the removal of the OTM ban, a third the relaxation of beef export rules.

However, as Paddy Moore, president of the International Meat Secretariat, pointed out, the global beef market has changed dramatically in a decade. International trade in all meats has increased by 5 million tonnes as developing countries, mainly in Asia, have more income and change their diet to include more meat.

Much of that increase, he said, has come from Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Argentina and Australia. Moore, who is also chief operations officer for the Irish Food Board, said: "Scotland and Ireland can't take them on head on, but they can sell on quality and image."

Andrew Smith, Tesco International (350 stores in Europe outside the UK, 291 in Asia), emphasised the importance of quality labels using central European beef production as-was as an example - cattle killed one day, on a retail shelf the next, time and temperature controls never considered, no in-store waste because all spoiled meat was recycled as mince or sausage, mains-power goads, no traceability, pole-axe slaughtering and no animal welfare considerations.

Now, he said, all slaughter and processing is to UK standards, full traceability, farm audits have started and a limited range of Good, Better and Best products have been introduced.