THE first case of “mad cow” disease in Canada in ten years has led to the slaughter of hundreds of beef cattle and the quarantine of thousands more on 17 beef farms, devastating the £13.3 billion-a-year Canadian beef industry.

Eight countries, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Mexico, have banned imports of Canadian cattle and beef. Canada is the world’s largest beef exporter and 78 per cent of its exported meat is shipped to the US. Clay Serby, the Agriculture Minister for Saskatchewan province, called yesterday for the wholesale slaughter of beef cattle, with full compensation to farmers, to restore confidence in Canadian beef.

Mr Serby said: “It’s about erring on the side of safety.” Only the extreme approach to BSE that was taken in Britain could restore the reputation of the Canadian beef industry before it was destroyed for ever, he said.

Shirley McLellan, the Agriculture Minister in neighbouring Alberta, the country’s leading beef producer, where the infected cow was found, said that she was also considering such drastic action.

The beef industry’s problems emerged on Wednesday when Lyle Vanclief, the Federal Agriculture Minister, announced in a televised news conference that a cow slaughtered in Alberta on January 31, with suspected pneumonia, had been confirmed on May 20 to have had BSE. He said that the conclusion was confirmed after body parts were sent to Britain for expert analysis. “I want to stress this is just one cow in one herd, and it never entered the food chain,” Mr Vanclief said last week.

Government officials were at pains to counter American criticism that it had taken Canada 3½ months to discover that a cow slaughtered in January was suffering from BSE.

Mr Vanclief’s explanation was that once the diseased cow was slaughtered and sent to a rendering plant, government scientists concentrated on testing the carcasses of other animals such as deer, elk and caribou, still in the food chain for Canadian native people.

Byron Dorgan, the North Dakota Senator who has been trying for years to ban Canadian wheat from the US, demanded that the American Government’s beef ban remain in effect until Canada had changed its beef and food safety monitoring system. In a letter to the US Agriculture Secretary, Anne Veneman, Senator Dorgan wrote: “Allowing the head of a diseased cow to sit on a shelf for four months because they are short-staffed is not an excuse our country should accept.”

Canada’s previous case of “mad cow” disease dates back ten years, when a cow that had been imported from Britain, a Black Angus from Scotland, was found to be affected. It was destroyed along with the five other cattle in the herd.

Across Canada slaughter houses have closed because of the expected drop in the local demand for beef and because of the foreign ban. The beef industry employs 140,000. Already some firms were talking about lay-offs.

Labour unions have demanded full government compensation for anyone laid off in the industry.

The affected cow was sent to one of three Alberta rendering plants — officials are trying to establish which — and turned into pig and poultry feed. Its use for cattle is banned, but many farms that have pigs or poultry also have cattle.

Potential costs

The ban on British beef exports that followed the BSE outbreak cut off foreign markets worth nearly £650 million a year, reducing farm incomes from £4.1 billion in 1996 to about £1 billion in 1998. Thousands of industry jobs were lost.

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