Ten days after it started, some sanity is beginning to return to the mad cow debate. The British Prime Minister has been right to argue that the main element is consumer confidence, and that the scientific evidence of BSE being transmitted across the species divide from cows to humans is uncertain and has been greatly overblown. But from those two statements many consequences flow that will have salutary lessons for politicians, scientific advisers and farmers long after beef consumption levels have settled.
Firstly, consumer confidence is a vital ingredients in all economic activities. Once undermined, it requires more than simple exhortations to restore it, and many beef producers here and in other EU states have reason to feel aggrieved at the cavalier fashion in which the crisis was allowed to develop in the first place and was subsequently handled in Britain. The last 10 days have seen extraordinary tergiversations by Mr Major's government in its attempt to defuse the alarm caused by the initial scientific warning. Much of the climate of uncertainty has been caused bye conflicting statements by ministers and by doubt about what exactly the scientists were saying.
Secondly, it is clear that, whatever the scientific basis, consumers are much more alert to what they eat than was the case even five or 10 years ago. The allegations of salmonella in British eggs some years ago by a Tory junior minister, Ms Edwina Currie, decimated the industry overnight, indicating the widespread suspicions over modern methods of production that hover just below the surface of public consciousness. Agricultural policy makers, particularly those obsessed with minimal cost production, will ignore this element in future at their penal.
There are or ought to be no shortcuts to good food. And, while public perception has played an enormous part in disrupting demand for beef, that should not obscure the fact that wrong decisions were taken, for financial reasons, in the British beef industry 15 years ago.
Thirdly, the chances of being infected with Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease may be two or three million to one or less; but to a generation accustomed to long odds in the National Lottery, that is not a risk worth taking. Nor should it be. The gross disparity between cases of BSE in British herds and those here and elsewhere in the world (many of which have been linked with cattle or feed imported from Britain) show that it is possible to limit the disease by adopting the right policies and implementing them ruthlessly. No doubt the British exchequer has been saved considerable expense over the years by culling individual affected animals rather than whole herds. It was false economy.
Today's emergency meeting in Luxembourg by EU agriculture ministers has the dual function of ensuring that non British beef does not continue to lose markets outside the Union by association; and of giving Britain support in dealing with its disease problem and restoring consumer confidence. This is as it should be in a converging economy, all should play by the same rules and draw the same advantages, just as all are affected by the consequences of error. But the spectacle of trivialisation by some ministers in London of the BSE question over the years is not so easy to eradicate. If the link with CJD is unproven, many people would argue, was this not reason to act as though it did exist rather than that it didn't?