McDonald's sales in France slump amid BSE panic

Sales of McDonald's hamburgers in France have collapsed amid a panic over the safety of beef that has gripped the French public during the past month.

Sales of McDonald's hamburgers in France have collapsed amid a panic over the safety of beef that has gripped the French public during the past month.

One French newspaper said yesterday that the company's nationwide turnover had fallen by 40 per cent, but sales of its trademark hamburgers had tumbled even further.

The slow but steady advance of BSE in France went almost unnoticed by the French public until the announcement three weeks ago that a small amount of "suspect" beef had reached supermarket shelves.

Since then, the wholesale market for French beef has plunged by up to 50 per cent, and even more on some days. Many restaurants and school canteens have taken red meat off the menu. Some eastern European countries have banned or restricted French beef, and Spain has defied EU law and placed an embargo on the trade of live French cattle.

With no sign of consumer fears subsiding, the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, will announce a series of protective measures today. He is expected to impose an immediate ban on the use of ground-up cattle carcasses in all animal feed and to promise widespread testing of animals for BSE.

Cattle bone and meat meal, which can harbour the prions - or rogue protein molecules - that transmit BSE, are blamed for the emergence of mad cow disease in Britain in the early 1990s. They have been banned from animal feeds in Britain since 1996 but are legal in France for fattening poultry and pigs. The rise in the number of BSE cases in France - more than 100 this year, against 31 last year - is blamed on both accidental and deliberate "crossover" use of poultry and pig feed to fatten cattle.

In recent days, consumer and political pressures have grown for a complete ban on farines animales or "animal flour". The Jospin government refused to respond at first, pointing to the huge cost and possible health dangers of storing or burning the remains of slaughtered cows. The government argues that consumer fears are irrational and based on an exaggerated impression of the scale of BSE in France.

Although the number of cases has tripled this year, the French BSE problem is on nothing like the scale of the catastrophe that befell British agriculture in the early to mid- 1990s when 80 cases of BSE were discovered daily.

The Jospin government is paying the price for its claim that it was pursuing a policy of "maximum precaution" with BSE when it defied EU rules and refused to import British beef a year ago. The French public has since learnt that British protections against BSE - and its human form, variant CJD - are tougher than those in France.

And if the collapse in beef sales continues, the French government may have to consider another of the British safeguards that Paris rejected a year ago. Beef sold in Britain must come from animals less than 30 months old. Scientists believe that BSE, even if latent, is not present in a transmissible form until a cow has lived for two and a half years.

There are no such restrictions on the age of cattle sold for human consumption in France. Luc Guyau, the leader of the main French farmers' union, the FNSEA, caused controversy last week when he proposed that dairy cattle, and some beef cattle, born before July 1996 should be removed from the food chain.

Some accounts in the French press gave the impression that this would mean the immediate cull of 5 million cows, but it would mostly have excluded older dairy cattle from the food chain when they reached the end of their milk-producing lives. The majority of BSE cases in France have been among dairy cows.

This limited proposal was rejected by many farmers and by the French Agriculture Minister, Jean Glavany, as too draconian, but such measures may have to be revived if the consumer panic continues.

But there is no justification for s chadenfreude in Britain; BSE almost certainly reached France via infected British animal feed, which was dumped on the French market after it was banned in the UK.

The French small farmers' leader and anti-global trade campaigner, José Bové, has been pushing for an investigation of the possible criminal negligence of French officials and feed companies. He said they allowed 14,000 tons of suspect feed to enter the country from Britain between 1993 and 1996 without ensuring that it was kept away from cattle.