HAMBURG (Reuters) – Germany’s farming and food industry is likely to have lost about 1 billion euros ($1 billion) of business following an outbreak of the livestock illness foot-and-mouth disease, the head of the farming cooperatives association told German media on Thursday.
Germany announced its first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in nearly 40 years on Jan. 10 in a herd of water buffalo on the outskirts of Berlin in the Brandenburg region.
Measures to contain the highly infectious disease, which poses no danger to humans, often involve bans on imports of meat and dairy products from affected countries, with Britain, South Korea and Mexico among states imposing import bans on Germany this week.
“Along the value-added chain, we believe that a sales loss of more than 1 billion euros exists,” Joerg Migende, head of the association of German farm cooperatives DRV, told German television programme ARD-Hauptstadtstudio.
He said the economic damage from foot-and-mouth to Germany looked like being “immense”.
Between January and October 2024, the UK imported German pig meat worth 448 million pounds ($545 million), Britain’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board said this week. Dairy imports during the same period were valued at 283 million pounds.
German authorities continued to test animals in the quarantine zone in the Brandenburg region on Thursday with test results still awaited.
A spokesperson for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said on Thursday the Commission was in constant contact with the German authorities and Germany’s efforts to stop the disease spreading would enable the regionalisation principle to be used.
Under this EU rule, sales of meat and dairy products are only restricted from the region where the disease has been confirmed and produce from elsewhere in the affected country can still be sold inside the EU.
(Reporting by Michael Hogan; Editing by Mark Potter)
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