An employee at the Doly-Com abbatoir in Romania, one of two companies that exported horsemeat

Romania struggles to swallow horsemeat scandal

Romania, wrongly named as the source of the horsemeat food fraud, has suffered more than most in the ready-meals scandal. Having been dealt a severe blow, the country’s agriculture industry now has to pick up the pieces and regain Europe's trust.

Published on 27 February 2013 at 12:02
An employee at the Doly-Com abbatoir in Romania, one of two companies that exported horsemeat

The horsemeat scandal has left a bitter aftertaste throughout Europe. There is bitterness in the United Kingdom and France, two countries which provided a textbook demonstration of how not to manage a crisis — complete with irresponsible reactions in the press and in government.

At the other end of the continent, there is bitterness in Romania, which found itself — as far as we know, unjustly — up to its neck in horse manure in the course of all of the mudslinging. And finally there is bitterness in the European Union, which once again showed that we have a long way to go if we are to achieve the solidarity needed for a federal Europe.

As soon as they found out that the “ground beef” in ready meals sold in the UK was in fact horse, the British went on an international witch-hunt. The first to be targeted by the press and a number of political leaders were the Irish — probably, as malicious gossips would have us believe, because they have a lot of horses over there.

Then, of course, it was the turn of the French, because as everyone knows the other side of the channel is the source of all evil. Then came the next baddie of the day, Romania.

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‘Mounted on wild horses’

Extravagant theories were conjured out of thin air: the surplus of horsemeat from Romanian abattoirs was the result of a ban outlawing horsedrawn vehicles on Romanian roads. And the media cliché of hordes of impatient Romanians just waiting to invade Britain in 2014 was given a new dramatic twist, when it emerged that the marauding migrants would be armed with meat cleavers and mounted on wild horses and donkeys.

And the finger pointing was not only British. The French were eager to offload blame too. In the country whose companies were directly implicated, Romania had already been designated as a scapegoat, long before there was any clarity on the compex supply route, which began with horsemeat in Romania and ended with beef in the UK. It mattered little that these accusations were hot air, and that no one found any irregularities in the Romanian stage of the process.

Bucharest was a ‘textbook suspect’

The truth of the matter is that Romania’s image is a real handicap. Bucharest was dragged into the scandal because it was a convenient "textbook suspect" as Prime Minister Victor Ponta put it. Right from the start, Romania was obliged to prove its innocence, even though its accusers had no proof of its guilt. But a country that is known for corruption which has infected the media, the police, the judiciary, parliament and a former prime minister Adrian Nastase, who is currently in prison, a country where some people steal eggs, while others steal doctoral theses and then insist they never took anything [Ponta has been accused of copying his doctoral thesis], can hardly put its hand on its heart and announce that it is beyond reproach.

Mountains of cucumbers

When the European Union finally succeeded in reining in the the scandal, it showed that it had the necessary mechanisms to manage such a crisis. The single alert system proved itself to be effective, however, it did not take long before Brussels was once again overwhelmed by the blame culture which member states employ when something goes wrong.

Let’s not forget that two years ago, large numbers of Spanish farmers were taken aback by the scandal of E. coli infected cucumbers, when Germany rushed to lay the blame for the crisis on the other side of the Pyrenees. The accusation turned out to be baseless, but the Spanish found themselves with mountains of unsold cucumbers.

This year, instead of cucumbers, we have beef. And instead of Spanish farmers, we have Romanian butchers and meat exporters, who have already been hard hit by a crisis in buyer confidence. The Ponta government has the opportunity to conduct a DNA test of its competence, in an extremely delicate context, with long-term potential consequences for Romanian animal husbandry. The question is will it pass this test, or will it do as the others have done, and seek an imaginary scapegoat abroad?

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