Will American memories of the BSE crisis hamper exports of Scottish beef?
For the first time in 20 years, the meat is allowed to be exported to the US following a ban in the wake of the BSE crisis of the 1990s. The move is expected to generate £66 million for the UK economy over the next five years.
US authorities have carried out extensive checks, inspections and discussions in recent years and comes a year after Japan lifted a similar ban and 14 years after the European Union changed its own regulations which had prevented the import of British beef since 1996.
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Hide AdNorthern Irish beef is the first to make its way over the Atlantic, with a shipment heading to the US today, paving the way for exports from the rest of the UK in the coming weeks.
However, convincing Americans to buy British beef may prove to be more tricky than it sounds. The product is still synonymous in many Americans’ heads, with the fatal neurological disease Variant Creutzfeldt Jakob, which can occur when a human eats infected meat.
In the 1990s, around 170 cases of the illness were diagnosed in the UK, after an outbreak of the related Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle.
Indeed, blood banks in North America still turn away potential donors who spent three months or more in the United Kingdom between 1 January, 1980 to 31 December, 1996, believing that they could still be silent carriers of the disease. A similar ban is in place in Australia.
In 1995, before the outbreak occurred, the UK exported 276,000 tonnes of beef with a value of £650m. Now, the figure is closer to 84,789 tonnes of exports, with the vast majority of that going to the EU.
At the time that the EU ban was lifted in 2006, experts warned that it would take a long time to win back confidence – and indeed contracts - which had, over the years, been picked up by other countries.
Now, the same will remain to be seen on the other side of the Atlantic.