The Politics of Panic

Mad cow madness swept across France last week as beef sales plummeted, school districts pulled red meat off their menus, and the country's leading farmers' union proposed to eliminate more than 3 million older cattle from the food chain in a desperate effort to restore public confidence. With the national scare over bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) reaching crisis proportions in France, other European countries, including Russia, Hungary, Poland and Spain, reacted by clamping total or partial bans on imports of beef and cattle from France.

The public panic escalated into a political tug-of-war when French President Jacques Chirac went on national television to call for an immediate ban on all animal-based feeds and for a program of systematic BSE testing at French slaughterhouses. "We must pull out of this crisis as quickly as possible," he said, "by applying the principle of precaution in the most rigorous manner." Ironically, France had earlier cited that same "principle of precaution" to justify its E.U.-defying ban on British beef imports.

Chirac's statement touched off a volley of criticism from the leftist government. Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who currently shares power with Chirac and who will likely face the Gaullist leader in the 2002 presidential election, was furious over what he considered a usurpation of his own position as head of government. "It is not the role of leaders to frighten public opinion," said Jospin, while Agriculture Minister Jean Glavany accused Chirac of feeding the "collective psychosis" for political ends. Most independent analysts agreed. "It was a politico-consumerist media coup intended to show that Chirac is protecting the French people," says political consultant Bernard Rideau. "But what it mainly showed is that Chirac has no power."

The Socialist-led government, in fact, was already considering the total feed ban proposed by the President, but only after a four-month scientific evaluation by the country's food safety watchdog agency and the drafting of plans to replace the animal proteins with vegetable substitutes. One reason for the government's hesitation: Agriculture Minister Glavany estimated that the elimination of meat-based feeds for pigs and poultry such feeds, a suspected source of BSE in cattle, have been banned for cows since 1994 would require importing $100 million in soy and other grains. But the government can ill afford the appearance of foot dragging: in the back of everyone's mind lurked the tainted-blood scandal of the late 1980s in which three former Socialist ministers were indicted for delaying the hiv-screening of contaminated blood products that eventually infected as many as 4,000 people with the aids virus.

The latest crisis was triggered by the discovery last month of a BSE-infected cow in a slaughterhouse in Normandy and the announcement that eight tons of possibly tainted beef from the same herd had been distributed by several large supermarket chains. The detection last week of four new cases of "mad cow" disease, bringing the total to 93 since the beginning of the year, further fueled the panic. Health Minister Dominique Gillot did little to calm public fears when she declared that "it is highly probable that we will have dozens of cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" the human variant of BSE that is incurable and always fatal.

That critical mass of alarming news touched off a chain reaction. Restaurant chains stopped serving cut-from-the-bone items, deemed potentially more vulnerable to BSE contamination, and superchef Alain Ducasse announced that he was taking beef off his menus. At the central Rungis market south of Paris, wholesale beef purchases plummeted as much as 60% from normal levels. The panic spread far beyond France's borders, as local officials eliminated beef from school cafeterias in Brussels and Geneva, while Germany considered joining the other four countries that have banned French beef imports. As the hysteria spread, European Commissioner for consumer affairs David Byrne announced plans to set up a new E.U. watchdog agency, charged with supervising food safety "from farm to fork," by 2002.

With more than 350,000 jobs at stake in the $20 billion-a-year French beef industry, officials strived to calm public fears. "I eat beef, as do my children and top-level experts on 'mad cow' disease," said Glavany. "If there were the slightest risk today, the government would have banned beef a long time ago." The problem with such assurances is that, in the wake of Britain's unwise downplaying of the epidemic in the past and of France's own tainted blood crisis, the public has little trust in the government's willingness or ability to protect their health. Unless Jospin's team takes dramatic steps to restore that trust and quickly mad cow madness could be a political as well as a medical menace.