adminseek ways to restore consumer confidence in meat products. This comes after the discovery that meat sold in Europe labelled as beef contained horse meat.
On Tuesday, a slaughterhouse and a meat firm were raided by police in the UK probing alleged horse meat mislabelling.
UK Environment Secretary Owen Paterson said it was unacceptable if British firms were defrauding the public.
The scandal has raised questions about the complexity of the food industry’s supply chains across the 27-member EU bloc, with a number of supermarket chains withdrawing frozen beef meals.
In the UK, the supermarket giant Tesco, frozen food firm Findus and budget chain Aldi received horse meat-tainted mince from Comigel, based in northeastern France.
Horse meat has now been confirmed in some frozen lasagne on sale in France too.
Comigel denied wrongdoing, saying it had ordered the meat from Spanghero, a firm in southern France, via a Comigel subsidiary in Luxembourg – Tavola.
The supply chain reportedly led back to traders in Cyprus and the Netherlands, then to abattoirs in Romania.
There are now calls for more specific labelling on processed meat products in the EU, to show country of origin, as in the case of fresh meat. But the cost of doing that may trigger opposition from food manufacturers.
Romania has denied claims that it was the source of the mislabelling of horse meat. Bucharest says horse meat that leaves the country has not been minced, and is labelled as horse.
The Kravys abattoir, named as the source of the Comigel meat, insists that its labelling is correct, with horse meat and beef kept clearly apart. It exports horse meat to Sweden, Netherlands, Bulgaria and Poland in its own trucks, the BBC reports. The abattoir is in Botosani, northeastern Romania, and slaughters 3 000-4 000 horses annually.
Agriculture ministers from the UK, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania and Sweden are expected to take part in the talks in Brussels, along with European Commission officials.
Retailers in some countries so far unaffected by the scandal have removed some processed foods from sale, as a precaution. That has been done in Germany and Switzerland. In the UK the supermarket chain Waitrose removed its Essential British Frozen Meatballs, labelled as beef, after pork was found in two batches.
The EU meeting is an opportunity to exchange ideas on where the problem might have originated and how to stop it in the future, the BBC’s Christian Fraser reports.
Tighter restrictions for the labelling of processed food are now in the pipeline, our correspondent adds.
“We are looking at whether (such labelling) is possible . . . but nothing is fixed yet,” said a spokesman for EU Health and Consumer Affairs Commissioner Tonio Borg.
There are growing concerns that a drug used to treat horses – and which is harmful to humans – could be in the food chain.
But EU officials say public health is not at stake, and the problem is instead one of mislabelling. – BBC.
Online Reporter