Swabe is the European Union Director for Humane Society International. This piece is adapted from the article Scant Progress Made in EU Hors emeat Regulation on
Horsetalk. Swabe contributed this article to LiveScience's
Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
The horse meat scandal, it seems, is far from over. One only needs to
look at the recent case revealing Latvian horse meat in frozen meat-pies
sold in the United Kingdom (UK) to see that horse meat fraud is
widespread.
Even in the legal horse meat trade, things are not completely
transparent. It has been three years since the European Union (EU)
introduced strict new requirements for the import of horse meat from
non-EU countries, yet meat from
horses
that should never have been slaughtered for export continues to arrive
on the EU market. The European Commission has failed to stem that tide
of horse meat imports.
The question is, when can we expect the commission to act?
Officials have yet to explicitly link imports from non-EU countries and
the horse meat implicated in the recent UK fraud. However, for those of
us working to protect horses, the discoveries of illicit horse meat in
beef burgers, lasagne and pies provides a missing puzzle piece: could
this be where so much of the horse meat imported into the EU is going?
Food suppliers already lawfully and routinely process horse meat into
cheap convenience foods
in some parts of Europe without many consumers realizing it (unless
they read the small print). It is easy to see how unscrupulous operators
have been able to launder horse meat into the food chain by passing it
off as beef. The rise of processed meat products explains, in part, the
apparent surfeit of horse meat in Europe, because most consumers are not clamoring to eat it.
Indeed, the European horse meat industry has been in steady decline
since the 1960s as both culinary tastes and cultural attitudes have
gradually changed. Even in France and Italy, traditional heartlands of
horse slaughter and consumption, the number of horses killed has waned
significantly. Statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization show that in 1961, 333,000 horses were slaughtered in
France and 283,000 horses were slaughtered in Italy. By 2011, the
numbers had dropped to 15,500 and 62,237, respectively.
Evidently, only a minority of French and Italian consumers are actually
going out of their way to regularly consume horse flesh. A survey
conducted by Ipsos MORI for Humane Society International in 2012 found
that only 50 percent of respondents in France and 58 percent in Italy
believed that it was acceptable to eat horses. Moreover, most
respondents said they never or only sometimes eat horse meat, whilst a
mere 3 percent of Italians and 4 percent of French claimed to eat it
frequently.
The fact is, Europe's declining horse meat industry is supplemented by
significant global imports. EU import statistics show large quantities
of horse meat annually being imported from Argentina, Brazil, Canada,
Mexico and Uruguay.
Even when horse meat appears on the label of processed meat products
with no question of food fraud, without mandatory origin labeling, EU
consumers still have no idea where that meat came from. Why does that
matter? Because imported horse flesh that fails to meet EU food safety
standards poses a potentially serious health hazard.
The end of July marked three years since the EU introduced stricter
import requirements. Only imports of horse meat from horses with a known
lifetime medical-treatment history, and whose records showed they
satisfied veterinary medicine withdrawal periods, are supposed to be
allowed in to the EU. Yet, measures taken by export countries to
preclude veterinary drug residues from entering the food chain are not
fit for purpose.
Approximately 20 percent of horse meat consumed in the EU comes from
Canada and Mexico, but the majority of that meat actually derives from
U.S. horses — which are not raised for slaughter, but instead vendors
acquired the horses from random sources. This is worrying because, in
the United States, the use of veterinary drugs such as phenylbutazone — a
non-steroidal anti-inflammatory prohibited in the EU for use in
food-producing animals — is widespread, and there is no mandatory, lifetime, veterinary medical record-keeping.
Canada's and Mexico's lack of compliance has been exposed multiple
times by non-governmental organizations, journalists and the European
Commission's Food and Veterinary Office (FVO), including the problem of
so-called "kill buyers," who purchase U.S. horses at auction and ship
them long distances over the border to be killed for food. Since 2010,
FVO audits have found that Canada and Mexico have failed to ensure that
all horse meat meets EU requirements.
In the aftermath of one of Europe's biggest-ever food scandals, the
European Commission has consistently failed to act to stop imports of
horse meat from third-party countries that do not meet EU food-safety
requirements. With consumer confidence at an all time low — exemplified
by this recent
survey
from Ireland — it is the Commission's duty to ensure that meat not
considered fit for human consumption by EU standards no longer ends up
on EU consumers' plates.
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