World

Slicing Into Butchers' Profits Overseas

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 24, 2001 / 5:56 PM EST / CBS

The parade of salami in this Berlin meat factory is relentless, the richly colored red slabs filing by in orderly rows to be sliced diagonally before falling into formation again for packaging.

But the music of the grinding, cutting and packaging machines is about to die at the Koenecke plant. The factory is to be closed, and owners blame Europe's mad cow crisis, which is making beef and meat an increasingly rare presence on people's dinner tables.

"It's like the movie Jaws when nobody went swimming," said Hartmut Droemert, who has worked in the Koenecke factory for 10 years. "We are losing our jobs, and it's totally crazy."

Across town at the rustic wooden tables of the Austria restaurant, the menu is missing a couple of musts: tafelspitz, a kind of stewed beef, and beef goulash. Instead, chefs are cooking venison goulash and have put an apology about the missing dishes in the menu.

In the climate of worry over seemingly daily revelations about mad cow disease - as bovine spongiform encephalopathy is commonly known - customers aren't complaining.

"We have gotten quite a positive response from the consumers who say it's great we've done something so quickly," restaurant manager Bodo Blum said.

Across Europe, it seems no national dish is safe from the scare over mad cow, a brain-wasting ailment that scientists believe is linked to variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, which afflicts humans. German newspapers have taken to rating the mad cow risks of the nation's many types of sausage. In Italy, Florence's famous specialty, the T-bone steak, is a target for a possible ban. France has already banned similar cuts of beef, often seen as the indispensable accompaniment to a glass of fine Bordeaux.

Greeks are still reeling from a European Union decision to outlaw the sale of some brains and other animal parts. Many traditional and holiday meals are built around dishes from innards, when Greeks savor lambs' heads, a sort of spleen hot dog called splinandero and kokoresti, a giant intestine-wrapped collection of sheep organs sometimes flavored with diced-up lung.

Spain also faces the potential loss of a national delicacy: meat from fighting bulls. The country's Agriculture Ministry is to make a decision on that before the bullfighting season takes off in mid-March.

The bulls would have to be tested for mad cow disease right after they die in the arena, but there's not enough veterinarians to test all the estimated 11,000 bulls killed in 2,000 bullfights every season.

Across Europ, chicken sales have skyrocketed, while beef sales have dropped as much as 80 percent. In Germany, organic farmers are hoping for a boom as the government pushes already environmentally conscious Germans to realize that safety and quality come at a price.

But that's not going to help the white-clad workers at the Koenecke factory. A yellow flier announcing the closure notes: "An end to the crisis is not in sight at this time."

The factory had already stopped producing beef salami because of a reduction in demand caused by consumer fears and was using turkey instead. Still, production dropped from 6,000 tons a year to negligible amounts, company headquarters in Bremen said, though it would not give precise figures.

The 62 workers who will lose their jobs when the factory closes at the end of May, along with another 30 part-time workers, are being offered jobs at the company's three other factories in Germany.

Koenecke is the first factory known to have closed because of mad cow, and there are no total figures for closures nationwide. But unions and industry associations warn more shutdowns won't be far behind.

Job losses from mad cow could reach 40,000, unions say, and 1,000 seasonal jobs have already been cut nationwide. Another 4,000 workers are on reduced shifts and pay, with 1,000 more waiting to have their hours cut.

"We expect more firms will be forced to close if the situation continues this way and if the politicians don't help," said Thomas Vogelsang, spokesman for the meat industry association.

Rather than close their doors, some businesses in Europe have simply changed their signs.

Sandro Belardinelli had worked as a butcher for 38 years in his downtown Rome shop that dates to the turn of the 19th century. But with the mad cow crisis reaching Italy, he converted his store last month into a fish shop.

"My father and grandfather worked here as butchers. This decision was a heavy one for me but business is better now, so I feel better," he said. "I've kept the same customers and maybe gained a few."