The foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Britain will neither benefit nor harm Brazil's meat exports to the EU market, Brazil's agriculture minister said Wednesday.
The detection of the disease is an "isolated fact," which will not much influence the country's exports, Reinhold Stephanes told the local press.
"There will not be any change. The question is isolated and England is solving the problem," he said, deviating from a previous prediction of a growth in sales to the European Union by exporters and analysts of the private sector .
He added that Brazil had stopped importing living animals or genetic material from Britain since the 1990s, after mad cow disease hit the country at that time.
Stephanes said that it is not up to the Brazilian federal government to take a stricter position concerning the issue, such as imposing an embargo on products from Britain or the EU.
However, Sao Paulo's state government announced that its sanitation authorities will consider the possibility of an embargo based on technical analyses.
"We are evaluating the impact to take measures on a technical, and not political, basis," said the State Secretary of Agriculture and Supply, Joao de Almeida Sampaio Filho, awaiting the results of tests ordered on imports from Britain.
Last Friday, the British government announced the detection of the foot-and-mouth cases in the country, causing wide repercussions. In 2001, the disease took a toll of over 10 million animals in the country.
Source: Xinhua
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