German Agriculture Minister Renate Kuenast said Tuesday it was all but inevitable that 400,000 German cows will have to be culled as part of a European drive to eliminate mad cow disease.
Kuenast, who has put off making the final decision, told Deutschlandfunk radio: "The slaughter of 400,000 cattle is all but inevitable."
Kunaest, who took office on January 9 as part of a government effort to come to terms with the mad cow scandal, has said she wants to review the potential slaughter despite it having already been approved by the other EU agricultural ministers.
But she said she would try to reach her decision Wednesday when the German cabinet meets.
The German government has supported the culling of all cows in a herd in which the illness is identified, but farmers have staged demonstrations against the policy.
German farmers in Bavaria, a major milk-producing state, have called for pursuing a Swiss policy under which only cows that are the same age, a year older or a year younger than the infected animal are destroyed in order to guarantee a farmer's cattle are BSE-free.
But in Brussels on Monday, EU agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler warned the European food crisis was "considerably more dramatic that we had envisaged" and that radical measures were needed to restore consumer confidence.
Scientists years ago established a link between mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a fatal, brain-wasting disease in humans -- BERLIN (AFP)
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