ANALYSIS - Europe again mulls animal feed as waste disposal
Date: 22-Jul-02
Country: NETHERLANDS
Author: Eric Onstad
In recent years horrified Europeans have watched news of cancer-causing dioxin, sewage sludge and ground-up dead animals ending up as ingredients in animal feed.
In the aftermath of each scandal, officials have scrambled to assure consumers that regulations were being toughened to prevent a repeat.
But the continent this summer is going through a familiar routine of angry farmers, quarantined farms and halted exports after a banned growth hormone found its way into the feed troughs of thousands of livestock.
Farmers and feed makers have pointed fingers at EU officials as moving too slowly to beef up regulations, but they have also raised a more fundamental question.
Can any guarantees be given in an industry that routinely uses bizarre waste products as foodstuffs for animals?
"It is unacceptable that animal feed is still regarded as a cheap waste disposal system," said FEFAC, the lobby group that represents Europe's 27 billion euro ($27.21 billion) commercial animal feed industry.
EU's farmer lobby group COPA/COGECA said they had had enough "garbage from compound feed manufacturers and enough sweet words" from the European Commission.
In the latest crisis, 11 out of the 15 European Union countries, including half of all Dutch pig farmers, found their animals were eating feed laced with hormone medroxyprogesterone-acetate (MPA), which is banned for use in livestock and believed to cause infertility in humans.
Irish officials say they traced the hormone contamination to waste water from a pharmaceutical plant there. The company has denied wrongdoing, saying it sent the waste for disposal and had no idea it would end up in animal feed.
Researchers and industry figures argue that proper use of waste products such as from yoghurt makers and potato processors fed to animals benefits the environment through recycling.
But to guard against more scandals, officials must move faster to put in place harmonised EU regulations for every step along the food chain, they say.
BIZARRE INGREDIENTS
For hundreds of years, farmers have used waste products for animal rations.
Less than one-third, or 125 million tonnes of the 400 million tonnes of food gobbled up by European livestock each year comes from commercial feed makers.
The rest comes from the farmers themselves, including self-grown grains and hay, plus cheap waste products purchased from creative suppliers who dream up new ways to sell by-products instead of paying to have them dumped.
"There are hundreds of things people use. A waste product can cost a lot of money to put it in a landfill, so it's just an economical way of looking at it," said Willem van Laarhoven, a Dutch agricultural consultant who used to work for a feed firm.
One German broker suggested marketing ground up chicken feathers as a good source of protein while others use remains of pig intestines processed by pharmaceutical firms for medicines.
If proper methods are followed, such as heat treatment to kill bio-organisms, even strange-sounding ingredients can be made safe for animal feed, experts say. But the wide range of suppliers and ingredients proves a nightmare to regulate.
"On the one hand, using waste is cheaper and better for the environment since it reduces rubbish, but there is more risk involved," said researcher Sandra van der Kroon at the Dutch Agricultural Economic Research Institute.
The institute has proposed a "double-check" system, where both suppliers and farmers are responsible for ensuring that ingredients come from approved sources.
EU CRITICISED
The EU has come under fire for moving too slowly after a major scandal in 1999, when fat from a Belgian rendering plant was contaminated with dioxin, probably from motor oil.
Europe's feed industry at the time urged the EU to impose uniform regulations across its 15 members, but the proposal only made it into a white paper, said FEFAC Secretary General Alexander Doering.
In the wake o