EU ministers to hold crisis talks over horsemeat scandal

EU agriculture ministers from the UK, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, Romania and Sweden have scheduled an urgent meeting in Brussels to discuss the horsemeat scandal, which is reported to have affected up to 16 countries.

The talks, which will be chaired by Irish Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney, will look to find ways to restore consumer confidence in meat products.

On Tuesday, a slaughterhouse and a meat firm in the UK were raided by police investigating alleged horsemeat mislabelling.

UK Environment Secretary Owen Paterson said it was unacceptable if British firms were defrauding the public.

Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw told The Exeter Daily: "It is totally unacceptable that people have been buying horsemeat labelled as beef. Inaccurate labelling is illegal and consumers have the right to have confidence that what they're eating is what it says on the label.

"Government Ministers have displayed breathtaking complacency on this. It took the Environment Secretary more the three weeks to meet the retailers and nearly four weeks to come to Parliament to answer questions."

The scandal has raised questions about the complexity of the food industry's supply chains across the 27-member EU bloc, with a number of supermarket chains withdrawing frozen beef meals.

Romania, which has been accused of being the source of the mislabelling of horsemeat, has denied the claims. Bucharest argues that horsemeat that leaves the country has not been minced, and is labelled as horse.