Polish exports of meat for Jews, Muslims in limbo

WARSAW, Poland (AP) ? For some, it was a barbaric way to treat animals. For others, it was great business.

Until January, slaughterhouses across Poland ? a deeply Catholic nation ? were the unlikely venues for the Islamic and Jewish slaughter of animals, which in both religions involves a swift cut to the throat of a conscious animal and death by bleeding.

Millions of euros were being made exporting the halal and kosher meat to countries like Egypt, Iran and Israel, as well as to Muslim and Jewish markets inside Europe.

In a victory for a growing animal rights movement, activists succeeded in getting a ban on such religious slaughter. But with economic decline deepening and exports seen as a possible salvation, the government faces pressure to get the practice reinstated legally ? and is scrambling to do so.

Though Poland's own cuisine is heavy in pork, a meat banned by Jewish and Islamic laws, the country has cut out this niche business for itself in one example of the economic savvy Poland has shown since joining the European Union in 2004. Kosher and halal meat exports have grown between 20 and 30 percent per year in recent years as the largely agricultural country has capitalized on its low labor costs and a reputation for healthy farm animals.

"God gave us good food, good soil and good farm animals, and he gave the Muslim countries what they have under the surface ? black gold," said Mufti Tomasz Miskiewicz, the top Muslim leader in Poland. "There are nations with big populations ? like Egypt, the Arab countries, Indonesia ? that need this food and don't have enough cattle to produce enough meat themselves."

The business has been overseen and encouraged by Poland's Jewish and Muslim communities, minorities that are very small but with a presence going back many centuries. Polish Jews once made up the world's largest Jewish population; though nearly wiped out in the Holocaust, the community is growing. Tatars, a Muslim people, also settled here centuries ago, and have been joined recently by Arab diplomats, businessmen and students.

The kosher and halal business had boomed until January, when the ban took effect following a ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal. Though the actual slaughter was carried out by specially trained Muslim and Jewish officials, the industry also created thousands of supporting jobs for others.

Animal rights activists argue that killing animals without stunning them first causes unnecessary suffering to the animals. Jewish and Muslim leaders strongly disagree, and insist that their method is actually more humane, in part became it causes the animals to lose consciousness very fast. They argue that standard industrial slaughter involves pre-stunning that is sometimes not effective, leading to even greater suffering.

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, says Jewish tradition has always been concerned with the welfare of animals, noting, for instance, that it bans hunting and any senseless suffering.

"For close to 3,000 years, Jewish slaughter practices have been followed that minimize pain to the animal," Schudrich said.

Polish meat industry officials are hesitant to take sides on which slaughter method causes more suffering, with their focus firmly on economics.

The pro-market government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is also eager to get the business going again and has recently drafted a law that would reinstate religious slaughter while also adding some new protections for animals.

The law's fate now rests with parliament, which is due to debate and vote on it in the coming weeks. It is expected to pass since the government enjoys majority support in the assembly, but probably not without some heated debate. Lawmakers are under pressure from all sides, including from an animal rights movement that has grown stronger as the ex-communist country grows increasingly Westernized.

In the meantime, industry leaders warn that millions of euros and thousands of jobs could be lost if Poland doesn't re-legalize religious slaughter soon.

"Banning ritual slaughter was a cardinal mistake with huge consequences," said Witold Choinski, the head of Polskie Mieso, or Polish Meat, an organization that represents the interests of meat producers.

Choinski said there are no official figures on the financial losses so far, but the number is high: the industry is worth about 500 million euros ($650 million) per year to the Polish economy and it has been largely frozen for nearly half a year. About 100,000 tons of kosher or halal beef and 100,000 tons of poultry were exported annually before the ban ? making up between 20 and 30 percent of Poland's beef exports and about 10 percent of poultry exports, Choinski said.

He says there is currently no production at all of the religiously slaughtered meat, though Miskiewicz and others say there is some small-scale production taking place in a legal gray zone.

Many of the Polish meat facilities which handle kosher and halal meat ? usually in addition to traditional slaughter ? have had to limit their overall production because of the ban, while major contracts with traders from the Middle East have been suspended, Choinski said.

Poland had been close to sealing major long-term contracts with Saudi Arabia, but these were abandoned because of the unclear legal situation. Meanwhile, many Polish companies that produce halal and kosher meat are on the verge of bankruptcy, and up to 6,000 workers could lose their jobs, he said.

"Poland can't afford this. Most meat production facilities are in small places without other places for people to work and this is dooming the economic prospects of people," he said. "But I think there will be a resolution because no government can allow 6,000 people to get laid off during an economic crisis."

For now, business is being picked up by producers in nearby countries, including Latvia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Miskiewicz said.

Bosnia is also working hard to position itself as an exporter of halal products. The country opened its first halal fair Wednesday in Sarajevo, welcoming representatives of the Islamic world to take a look at Bosnian products. Erdal Trhulj, Bosnia's regional industry minister, said the halal industry is growing worldwide, and that his country "aims to become a hub for halal industry in this part of Europe."

The debate surrounding the issue has lacked any overt anti-Jewish or anti-Islamic tones, though religious rights are also pressing concern for the minorities and a government that wants to maintain good ties with them.

Miskiewicz says there is a degree of unfairness in banning Jewish and Islamic slaughter when so many Polish Catholics follow a similar practice themselves at Christmas, when carp are slaughtered in homes across the nation without any pre-stunning.

___

Associated Press writer Aida Cerkez in Sarajevo, Bosnia, contributed to this report.

___

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/polish-exports-meat-jews-muslims-limbo-063929652.html

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Fertilizer plant blast: How lax security hints at regulatory gaps in Texas

During testimony before a Texas House committee last week, state regulators did not disclose knowing that thieves had for years exploited lackadaisical security to infiltrate the chemical storage areas of the West Fertilizer Co., which vanished in a massive explosion on April 17.

But plant security is just one of several areas of minimal or absent government oversight that have come to light since the explosion. Fifteen people died and dozens of structures were destroyed when a tank of ammonium nitrate blew up as firefighters tried to douse a fire at the plant.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has steadfastly asserted that the state?s pro-business, anti-regulation attitude is not to blame for the explosion or its aftermath. But as a House committee began to ask questions this week of key regulators, no one from the state?s major oversight agencies ? which included the state chemist, as well as heads of the department of public safety, insurance commission, and environmental quality ? mentioned the plant?s long record of theft problems, an issue reported in a Reuters exclusive Friday.

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The omission points to one of several potential regulatory gaps in how states and the federal government oversee volatile compounds stored near homes and schools, in particular whether laws are strong enough to allow inspectors to force industries like fertilizer plants to beef up costly security and fire suppression equipment on their premises.

?I guess [Texas state regulators] don?t want people to know there?s no security,? says Glenn Smith, the Austin-based author of ?The Politics of Deceit: Saving Freedom and Democracy from Extinction.?

?The problem is, there are 44 other facilities like this scattered around the state,? he says, ?and if you listen to the agencies with jurisdiction, none of those [sites] are protected to the degree they should be, and that shouldn?t stand. This shouldn?t even be a political issue.?

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With an investigation ongoing at the 15-acre explosion site, there?s no information so far to suggest the fire that led to the explosion was related to a security breach.

Moreover, thieves in the past had targeted the plant?s anhydrous ammonia tanks, which remained intact after the explosion. Anhydrous ammonia can be used as an ingredient in the illicit cooking of methamphetamines, and thieves across the country target both larger facilities and smaller farm storage tanks, according to government researchers.

Plant officials have said that on several occasions thieves caused air-borne releases from the plant after twisting off valves to get to the anhydrous ammonia.

What exploded in West was up to 542,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, the same fertilizer component used by Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1996. The West explosion registered a 2.1 on the Richter scale.

But McLennan County Chief Deputy Sheriff Matt Cawthon told Reuters that security at the plant was lax, meaning there were no perimeter fence, no burglar alarms, and no security guards. ?Everybody trusts everybody,? he explained.

Growing concerns about the requirements of physical security at such plants is magnified by the resistance among appointed state regulators to release information about where hazardous materials are stored, fearing such details could get into terrorist hands, critics say. State agencies have resisted local newspapers? demands for more information on such sites, citing an obscure ?confidential information? law.

?The reality is there?s plenty of chemical plants out in the open that terrorists can strike if they really want to do this,? says Erik Loomis, a historian at the University of Rhode Island who has followed the aftermath in West.

Since the deadly blast, several potential breakdowns have emerged in how Texas oversaw the West plant, even though the plant had been inspected by a variety of federal and state agencies, as recently as February 2012.

? The plant had been cited by at least one federal agency for the failure to have a proper emergency plan, for which it paid a $5,000 fine after correcting the problems and reporting that a short venting of gas was a worst-case scenario at the plant.

? While industries are required by federal law passed after the Oklahoma City bombing to report the storage of major amounts of ammonium nitrate, the West plant never did.

? Texas regulations put most of the onus for safety and planning on local emergency planning committees and the local fire marshal, prompting Nim Kidd, head of the state Office of Emergency Management, to recommend in his testimony to the Texas House committee Wednesday that concerned citizens ?go talk to your fire chief, your mayor, or your county judge. That's how planning works in Texas.? One problem: Unlike most Texas counties, West doesn?t have a fire marshal.

? Texas Insurance Commissioner Elizabeth Kitzman testified that the insurance policy for the West Fertilizer Co. bore ?no relationship to the amount of risk that was involved,? suggesting that insurance requirement reform could goose the marketplace to play a bigger role in forcing plants to update their safety and security protocols. The plant was insured for $1 million in liability and the explosion caused as much as $100 million in damage, Fox News Latino reported on Saturday.

Yet on Friday, the revelations of theft problems at the plant struck at another potential regulatory weakness: the fact that state regulators acknowledge that their primary role is to ensure fairness in the marketplace, not necessarily harp on problems like security or storage.

Asked by legislators on Wednesday whether the Office of the State Chemist would notify authorities if investigators saw problems with security, State Chemist Tim Herrman said, ?There aren?t any provisions in the law that really require a certain means of storing chemicals, but ? if we saw that there had been vandalism, theft, or that the perimeter had been breached, or that inventory records had discrepancies, it?s very common for us to contact law enforcement officials.? Mr. Herrman, however, did not explicitly tell legislators that his office had noticed anything amiss with the West plant?s security.

The security problems, it turns out, had appeared in other regulatory paperwork with the state. In 2006 the plant?s owners reported to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality that problems with thefts had ended, though more thefts were reported as late as October 2012, according to Reuters. The company has claimed it installed security cameras on the property.

Since the explosion, critics around the country have lambasted the state of Texas for its perceived lax regulation. The issue has played especially large in California, a perennial rival of Texas for economic development, where regulations are more onerous for businesses.

Governor Perry lashed out this week at an editorial cartoonist from California who juxtaposed Perry?s assertion that Texas? low regulatory requirements have helped the Texas economy ?explode? with an image of a massive explosion in West, embellished with the word ?Boom.?

The cartoon was published after Perry denied that the state regulatory system was to blame for what happened in West. But lawmakers are clearly facing pressure to get to the bottom of the state?s role in what happened.

?We?re inundated with the whys and whos, and we?re trying to clarify what role the state has at each individual level,? said state Rep. Joe Pickett, an El Paso Democrat and chairman of the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee. ?We?re trying to unravel how it happened, and how the state took the plant at its word that there was no chance of a fire or accident there.?

US Sen. Barbara Boxer of California said this week that the Senate will also hold hearings on the West disaster, commenting that, ?It is critical that we find out how this happened ? [and] look at how the laws on the books are being enforced and whether there is a need to strengthen them.?

The push to investigate and possibly tweak regulations in Texas after West, however, may be complicated by the fact that the chief victims, the residents of West, have largely sympathized with the plant owner. Many residents saw the plant as simply a part of the natural risk of living in rural areas, though Mr. Smith, the Austin author, argues that, ?I don?t think there?s any attitude in West that, ?Oh, we?re willing to pay this price for the state not regulating fertilizer plants;? I don?t think it can go that far.?

In the case of West, what University of Rhode Island?s Professor Loomis calls a natural American tendency to sympathize with or even be intimidated by industry appeared in a 2002 complaint against the fertilizer plant, in which a concerned resident wrote that, ?Particles are falling like snow around town. People are afraid to complain.?

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fertilizer-plant-blast-lax-security-hints-regulatory-gaps-122630940.html

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