Originally from: lina
                        
Christopher Booker's Notebook
(Filed: 21/09/2003)

Ear tags too much to bear

It is not often British officials go out of their way
to show that an
item of EU
legislation is completely unworkable. But this what
the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has done with a
proposal from the
European
Commission's health and consumer safety directorate,
known as Sanco,
(in full,
"Direction generale de la sante et de la protection
des
consommateurs"), run by
David Byrne. This draft regulation "on establishing a
system for the
identification and registration of ovine and caprine
animals" lays
down, in the
name of "traceability", that all sheep and goats in
the EU must carry a
14-digit
plastic tag in each ear, so that each time an animal
is moved its
number can be
recorded.

As any farmer would immediately recognise, this
proposal is insane.
Sheep do not
like plastic tags being pinned in their ears, and do
anything to get
rid of
them. At least 15 per cent of tags get lost, which
means that each time
a hill
farmer with 1,000 sheep scattered over 50 square miles
of moorland
finds animals
without tags, he must round up his entire flock and
copy down every
14-digit
number to see which are missing. How could a market
such as Longtown in
Cumbria,
with a throughput of tens of thousands of sheep a day,
record millions
of digits
in a few hours?

The Tory MEP Neil Parish, himself a farmer, then
discovered that Defra
had
costed up Sanco's proposal. Allowing three minutes for
each tagging or
check on
a number, with labour costs of £12 an hour, Defra
calculated that the
basic cost
of the scheme to the average UK sheep farmer would be
between £13,000
and
£16,000 a year. Sheep farmers' current annual incomes
average £11,136.

There are 67 million sheep movements a year, so
copying the digits
would take
3.35 million hours, totalling £40 million. Replacing
lost tags would
cost
another £14 million. Adding further costs, such as
on-farm
record-keeping (£8
million), and Defra's figures show that scarcely a
sheep farmer in
Britain could
stay in business.

Yet when Mr Parish and his fellow MEPs on the European
Parliament's
agriculture
committee recently quizzed no fewer than eight of Mr
Byrne's officials
on what
they thought they were doing, it was clear the
officials knew nothing
about
sheep (the regulation merely takes a previous version
referring to
cattle,
changing "bovine" to "ovine" throughout). It was
equally clear that the
officials had no intention of changing a regulation
that will make
sheep farming
virtually impossible.