A worker handles meat at the Doly-Com abattoir, one of the two units checked by Romanian authorities in the horse meat scandal, in the village of Roma, northern Romania, Tuesday. — AP POROSCHIA, Romania — Florin Dumitru, like millions of subsistence farmers in Romania, the European Union's second-poorest country, will have no choice when the horse that ploughs his scrap of land can no longer earn its keep. “What do you have to do when he can't plough or pull a cart any more? You just sell it to the slaughterhouse to butcher it,” said Dumitru, 40, who lives in Poroschia, home to one of Romania's big abattoirs. After slaughter, some of Romania's horses, the only option for the many farmers who can't afford a tractor, have found their way across Europe, through processors and middlemen and finally into frozen meals masquerading as beef. Increasing globalisation in food production and pressure from retailers to drive down costs has created a fiendishly complicated supply chain, particularly for processed foods with multiple separately sourced inputs, raising the risk of adulteration, whether by design to save money through cheaper ingredients or through poor standards. Industry sources say the abattoirs pay about 3.5 lei ($1.07) per kilo for a horse, but 5.5 lei/kg for a cow. The animals butchered in Romania took a roundabout route to British and French dinner tables, via Dutch and Cypriot traders and a French company that supplied meat to a Luxembourg factory belonging to a second French firm, Comigel. It still remains unclear how and where the horse became “beef”. Romanian officials say their abattoirs meet EU standards and their investigation has cleared the two possible sources of the horsemeat, one in Transylvania and the other at Botosani close to the borders with Ukraine and Moldova, of relabeling it. “If you are looking for a guilty party in this, it is rural poverty in Romania,” said Stuart Meikle, an agricultural investment adviser who has run a farming business in Romania. “This is part of a much wider rural poverty issue. The government has glossed over it, and the international community has largely not bothered to find out what is really happening.” “This is part of a much wider rural poverty issue. Agriculture in Romania is outdated, with fragmented farmland — Dumitru farms less than an acre (0.3 hectares) — and little mechanization. Horse-drawn carts share the road with trucks. CarmOlimp executive director Paul Soneriu, whose parents founded the company in 1993, said it produced about 60 tonnes of horsemeat last year, less than 1 percent of turnover. “In Romania, the horse is not a noble animal like in England; it is just an animal for work,” he said. “When it becomes a burden for the villager because of its age or lack of feed, the Romanian peasant tries to make some money out of it.” The British government and the EU have called for “horsemeat summits” to investigate the food scandal, with British officials surmising that a criminal conspiracy would be found responsible for substituting cheaper horsemeat for beef. The issue will be on the agenda of the next formal meeting of EU agriculture ministers on Feb. 25. “I am a little amazed at the whole chain involved; it is a sad indictment of the food industry,” said Meikle. — Reuters
