European support for sheep claims

Scottish farming leaders yesterday admitted that they still faced a major battle before they convince civil servants in the European Union that it was neither possible nor practical to provide 100 per cent accuracy in the electronic recording of sheep.

But after a week of meetings on the issue, NFU Scotland president Nigel Miller said he was heartened by the unanimous support the Scottish delegation had received from the main European farmers' organization, COPA.

Speaking from Brussels, Miller described the past week's talks as being "pretty intensive".

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"The European Commission appears to be focusing principally on compliance with the detail of Regulation 21/2004," he said, "whereas the UK's proposed 'grid of sanctions' - drafted to help producers maintain traceability under the new rules in a workable fashion with targeted, achievable cross-compliance standards - has been deemed inadmissible because it cannot deliver a 100 per cent read rate."

He warned that placing 100 per cent compliance ahead of traceability and practicality could destroy the value of the EID systems the UK had already gone to so much effort to produce.

"It was striking that at COPA's sheep meeting, which followed our meeting with the Commission, we gained unanimous support for tolerances. The French chairman of the sheep meeting deemed the issue a 'significant priority'."

With this encouragement from fellow farmers, Miller said the next moves would be at member state level where they would try to develop workable standards before taking the issue up again with the EU Commission.

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