February 13, 2007

EU would have hit back if UK banned poultry from Hungary

The UK could not have stopped Bernard Matthews PLC from importing poultry meat from Hungary after the outbreak of bird flu at its plant in Suffolk, England, without breaching European Union rules, David Miliband, the UK environment secretary, said Sunday (Feb 11), the Financial Times reports Monday.

Miliband told the BBC's Sunday AM that the imposition of a blanket ban on all turkey imports from Hungary would have been illegal.

"That would have been in contravention of the EU free trade treaty," he said. "If we had done that, the EU would have taken a very dim view of what we had done and may well have taken measures against us," he said.

Under EU rules, Hungary cannot export any poultry from within a 10 kilometre zone around the place where bird flu has been detected. Poultry farmers in the rest of the country can continue to trade.