Sir; I wish to take umbrage about a story on beef exports to Holland (The Grocer, January 15, p14). The fourth paragraph refers to "the fight to return British beef to supermarket shelves on the continent". This phrase crops up in nearly every story about beef exports but is fundamentally wrong. British beef was never stocked on supermarket shelves on the continent, except in very small quantities briefly during the '80s and again in the early '90s. The British beef exports banned by the European Commission in 1996 comprised, mostly, two types of commodity: about half a million live dairy calves, shipped annually to Holland and France for fattening as veal, and 300,000 cow carcasses sent to France as manufacturing grade beef. Press releases from the NFU and other outfits give the impression of continental consumers being denied the right to buy high-quality British sirloin steaks. That trade is almost entirely a myth: a little Scottish beef went to Germany in the '80s, but they stopped buying it commercially, and their government banned it in the early days of the BSE controversy. Exports of quality beef to some other EU states did build up in the late '80s and early '90s. However, this was almost entirely for the catering trades, mainly in Italy. The primary impetus was low price caused by the sterling devaluation of 1992. This competitiveness led to high quality "clean beef" becoming the majority of tonnage shipped for a short time in 1993-94. In 1995, well before the Brussels ban, these exports were already declining as the sterling exchange rate strengthened. Name & address supplied {{LETTERS }}

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