It could take years to beef up farmers' sales

Joanna and husband David, of Home Farm, Charlton, near Wantage, have simply been through too much to imagine everything is about to change.

But at least they recognise the long haul back for beef farmers may have begun with the EU farm ministers' decision to end the global ban on our beef.

"We have to see it as a positive move," said Joanna, who has been a beef farmer for 35 years. "But I would still like to see it in black and white first. We have heard about the ban being lifted so many times."

She has no illusions that ban or no ban, it could take years for consumer confidence to return in France, Germany and other parts of the world.

The 32-month ban on beef exports, introduced in the aftermath of the Mad Cow Disease crisis, left livestock farmers throughout Oxfordshire with the miserable prospect of producing animals that nobody wanted. The Castles managed by selling much of their land for housing, renting out farm buildings and ploughing up grassland to grow crops.

Joanna, who has been a beef farmer for 35 years said: "We were lucky because we are arable farmers as well. But for people who are just in livestock it has been desperate.

"We have farming friends in Shropshire and Wales who have had to go out and get other jobs."

County chairman of the National Farmers' Union, Brian Barnett, warned that the lifting of the ban was only partial. He said: "Initially only the export of boneless beef and beef products will be allowed. We expect this to begin fairly early in the New Year.

"It will be some time before the export of live animals, particularly our high prized breeding stock, can begin again. It will be a very long time before we can recapture our lost markets, which used to total around £650m per year.

"But the lifting of the ban is a much needed psychological boost to British farmers, who have just experienced a second year of plummeting incomes."

Charles Peers, a beef and arable farmer, of Views Farm, Great Milton, predicted a painfully slow recovery. "In the short term the ban will not make a lot of difference.

"We may find that a lot of farmers may not be able to comply with some of the conditions that countries like Germany now lay down. My guess is that it will be two years before we are trading anywhere near the levels that we were before BSE." "The whole thing has been devastating. But I at least get the feeling that consumer confidence in this country has now returned to normal."

Mrs Castle said her family is already planning a first tentative expansion and will buy 50 Aberdeen Angus beef cattle in March, interestingly, under a Waitrose scheme.

For there can be no doubt that BSE has given the already dominant supermarket chains an increasingly powerful role.

Waitrose, and other food firms anxious to reassure customers, are now able to lay down their own detailed guidelines, happy in the knowledge that farmers will dance to their tune.

Marilyn Ivings, an arable, beef and pig farmer of Church Enstone, said: "They lifted the ban in Northern Ireland six months ago, and the farmers there have made hardly any inroads into export markets. I think it will take five years before supply and demand come back into line.

They are now overproducing in France and Germany and they are not going to relinquish their markets easily.

"But it will be nice no longer to be the Pariah of Europe."

CJD LINK LED TO CHANGES

*The beef ban was introduced following the discovery of a link between mad cow disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) and its human equivalent Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease

*More than three million cattle have been slaughtered to deal with the crisis, which will have cost the British taxpayer £4bn by 2001 *The cost of BSE to British farmers in lost export markets is £650m a year

* British cattle must now have passports, carrying details abut date of birth and family to ensure that all cattle can be traced reliably.

PLEASING RESULT

The worldwide ban on British beef exports was lifted yesterday

- with Germany keeping up its opposition to the bitter end.

A vote of EU farm ministers was better than the Government dared hope - with ten member states in favour, four abstaining and only Germany refusing to budge.

The decision must now be ratified by the College of Commissioners in Brussels. But it now seems unlikely that the first shipment of beef will be able to leave Britain before March, as further EU checks are carried out.

There are still strict conditions on the beef exported. Under the deal:

*The beef must come from animals aged between six and 30 months

*The meat must come from animals whose mothers are known not to have had BSE

*Meat has to be taken off the bone. In any case, beef on the bone products are still banned in this country, where it remains illegal to eat T-bone steaks. MP ACCUSES EU PARTNERS OF 'FIX'

Former Agriculture Minister Tony Baldry accused Britain's European partners of deliberately prolonging the BSE crisis so their own farmers could cash in.

Mr Baldry, the Conservative MP for Banbury, claimed the ban was cynically kept in place to allow foreign farmers to cash in, long after any risk to consumers had disappeared.

Mr Baldry said: "The lifting of the ban is long overdue. There has been no scientific justification for maintaining it for a very long time.

"There are many reasons it has taken so long to have it lifted. Others have seen the ban as a good commercial opportunity to take commercial advantage.

"But it is nevertheless good news for British farmers. British beef is certainly among the safest in the world."

He said UK livestock farmers had complied with all manner of conditions, which now ensured cattle could be traced. Mr Baldry said it was unfair to blame the BSE crisis on farmers, feed manufacturers or politicians. "I believe it was an accident of history. It is wrong to blame any groups or individuals," he said.

He said because British farmers traditionally made greater use of concentrated cattle protein, they were always going to be more vulnerable when problems arose with the feed.

But in March, Oxford scientist Prof Roy Anderson told the BSE inquiry that 250,000 cattle were needlessly infected.

Prof Anderson said herds were given contaminated feed despite mounting concern over the safety of offal-based foodstuffs, and new cases of mad cow disease continued to be diagnosed throughout the early 1990s.

Banbury Stockyard, Europe's biggest livestock market, was one of the victims of the BSE crisis .

Its 1,000-year history ended with the loss of 100 jobs earlier this year.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.