Western Producer staff
There are some nervous glances being cast in the direction of the United Kingdom these days by meat industry leaders and Agriculture Canada officials. The fear is that an anti-meat consumer uprising now gripping the U.K. might spread to Canada.
It is based on a growing fear of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) and whether it can be passed from meat to humans as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare brain condition.
In Britain, there has been a growing media campaign exposing cases of mad cow disease and speculating on links to CJD cases. As a result, beef consumption in the U.K. fell 20 percent before Christmas, some packers went out of business and hundreds of thousands of schools and homes quit buying beef.
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For the record, there is no proved link between the cow disease and the human disease. Still, after a minor Canadian uproar in 1993 when one diseased cow was imported from England to Alberta, Canadian officials are afraid of a mirror campaign here by media and anti-meat activists.
“Even to talk or write about it is to take a risk of starting something,” an edgy Mervyn Baker, director of Agriculture Canada’s meat and poultry products division says.
Yet talk about it he did, when he told a meeting of Canadian meat packers recently that the government is reviewing measures in place to keep mad cow disease out of Canada “and to maintain consumer confidence in the safety of the Canadian meat supply.”
A chronology of the British case, compiled and analyzed by University of Guelph graduate student Douglas Powell, suggests that government and industry damage control would be largely ineffective in the face of a well-publicized anti-meat scare campaign.
Why? “Facts alone are never enough,” says Powell. Consumers are apt to see the meat industry and the government with a vested interest in keeping any problem under wraps.
As he tells the story, British government and industry officials have continually assured consumers there is no danger, no connection and no cause for worry.
All the while, the consumer reaction and boycott has been rising to a fever pitch. Powell suggests the industry prepare by finding credible spokesmen and a credible message, vying for consumer trust. Be open and challenge inaccurate claims.
Baker said the department’s strategy will be to internally review existing protections to make sure infected animals and meat cannot be imported, to speak out only if a public uproar develops and then to assure Canadian consumers they “have no cause for concern about BSE whether it turns out to be transmissible to humans or not.”
The trump card will be to argue that because potentially infected animals were destroyed in 1993, the disease does not exist here.
Still, with an open U.S. border for meat and a strong anti-meat lobby in North America, such assurances may not be enough. And Britain right now provides living proof of the damage that consumer fear can have on a market, justified or not.
