- guardian.co.uk,
- Wednesday May 03 2006 16:45 BST
It is thought some areas of the trade may never return to the levels they reached in 1995, when the UK exported 276,000 tonnes of beef with a value of £650m.
The EU imposed a worldwide ban on UK beef exports in 1996 as a result of the BSE epidemic.
A total of 183,000 cases of the disease have been confirmed in Britain, although fewer than one in 5,000 UK cattle are now infected.
The Meat and Livestock Commission (MLC) said it expected only 30,000 tonnes of beef to be exported to the EU in 2006, and spokesman Guy Attenborough said it would take six months to get an idea of whether the industry would recover from the ban.
"It's going to be modest, very modest ... it's a market that's been excluded to us for more than a decade," he said. "Other people are in those markets at the moment, supplying the contracts that we want, and we've got to win those markets."
The National Farmers' Union president, Peter Kendall, described the lifting of the ban as "fantastic news" for British farmers.
"We can now take full advantage of the huge investment the British beef industry has made in quality assurance, which gives our industry a huge edge over the competition," he said.
In the medium term, the lifting of the ban is likely to lead to a rise in beef prices for British consumers as increased demand from overseas raises wholesale prices and brings them in line with other countries.
British beef sells at £2 a kilo wholesale, compared with around £2.30 in most European countries and £2.57 in Italy.
The National Beef Association president, Duff Burrell, said it would take time to build up the rapport needed to market British beef in Europe after the decade-long ban.
"The contacts people had 10 years ago often just aren't there any more, so a lot of new contacts have to be made," he said.
France - which imported 80,000 tonnes of British beef in 1995 - is expected to be one of the toughest markets to crack, and the agriculture minister, Lord Bach, said rebuilding it would take time.
"In general terms, France was a very important importer of British beef up until the ban," he told the Press Association. "From what I am told, there is clearly a market for it - but it is not going to be easy, anywhere in Europe, to turn on the tap again."
Preliminary figures suggest this week's exports will amount to between only 40 and 80 tonnes of beef, although that figure is expected to rise significantly over the coming weeks.
The export of live cattle may never return to the levels it reached before the EU ban - news that has welcomed by environmentalists, who blockaded British ports in the early 90s to protest at the export of veal calves.
Laurence Stephenson, a Compassion in World Farming spokesman, said the government should minimise the live export trade. "Live export is poor for the welfare of calves, causing stress and dehydration," he said.
"We would like to see all meat export go the way of the majority of meat exported, which is pre-slaughtered and pre-packaged meat rather than live animals."
