ABA Continues To Fight Against Imports
AUSTRALIA - Australian Beef Association Chairman Brad Bellinger said, “The Government has made yet another major policy blunder in its decision to import beef from countries that have had the terrible form of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy’s (TSEs) called Mad Cow Disease. He said that it is transferable to humans in the form of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) - a fatal prion disease.”
26 February 2010
2 minute read
He said that the recent announcement to use NLIS equivalency, or a similar system, will neither stop imports, nor give increased safety guarantees to Australian consumers. This issue has caught all three ministers Roxon, Burke and Crean asleep at the wheel.
They should realise that NLIS provides no mandated trace forward to the consumer on individual cuts of meat. Both Canada and Japanese cattle have tags in their cattle’s ears, yet both are revealing increased BSE cases. NLIS is nothing more than a half billion dollar ‘white elephant’, pushed onto cattle producers by naive State Ag Ministers under the advice of RMAC and their State Farming Organisation membership.
Mr Bellinger said, “The Cattle Council was going against the wishes of 99 per cent of producers by supporting the move to import beef from BSE affected countries. The majority of Australia’s pig producers have been put out of business by imported pig meat from subsidised producers in US, Canada and Denmark; - now it is the beef industry’s turn to be ‘sold out’”.
ABA opposes this move on six counts:
- The danger to human health;
- The threat to animal health;
- The economic chaos that will follow, as domestic abattoirs close and producers have to sell their already debt ridden farms;
- The abandonment of Australia’s proud marketing slogan ‘Clean and Green,’ which underpins the 65 per cent of our production, which we export;
- The increase to our frightening foreign debt, as we buy what we now produce;
- The increase in carbon footprints, as beef passes beef in an insane swap across the Pacific Ocean.
Minister Crean gives a 100 per cent human safety guarantee – after a Professor of Health Statistics was given 18 days to study one of the least understood diseases known to man! This is disease that has already caused over 200 people very painful deaths.
Mr Crean is being very badly advised by a body that represents the interests of one percent of producers. More importantly, he is foisting a needless health risk on Australian consumers.
While Mr Bellinger said he agrees with calls that Cattle Council President Greg Brown should be sacked but he goes further, in calling for the sacking of the key ministers responsible for this negligent decision.
TheCattleSite News Desk
