MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

EU tightens beef rules

EU agricultural officials have tightened up definitions of cuts of top-quality South American beef to reduce the chance of fraudulent imports under the bloc's reduced-duty quotas, officials said yesterday.

In 2003 the EU's anti-fraud unit Olaf issued a report saying that the definitions of certain high-quality beef import quotas left EU buyers open to the possibility that exporters might be able to ship beef originating from outside their country.

Although there is no evidence of fraud, those definitions have now been revised to make sure that exporters in the countries involved ? Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay ? cannot fill their quota allocations with meat from another country.

"This aims at ensuring traceability for the imported meat from a certain country. Animals must have been grazing pastures to be labelled as "high quality" and not eaten feedstuffs like meal," one EU official told reporters.

"The tariff quota was too flexible and so they wanted to make a specific definition," he said.

An official at the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, denied any evidence of illegal practices.

"Olaf found that our arrangements for Hilton beef for those three countries were suspect so we've had to change them," he said, speaking on the margins of an informal meeting of EU farm ministers in Finland.