The Associated Press / by RAF CASERT
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The government added Belgian butter to its list of banned foods today, denying residents yet another key ingredient in their increasingly meager diet because of the dioxin food scandal.
Leaders huddled in crisis session for a fourth straight day today, while hundreds of butcher and baker shops closed because the government already has banned sales of Belgian poultry, eggs, fatty beef and pork, and all byproducts.
The food industry federation said the 11-day crisis over tainted animal feed already has cost producers $500 million.
The United States blocked European Union imports of pork and poultry, and Singapore banned all meat products from the 15-nation group. Countries from Switzerland to South Korea took similar measures against Belgian products.
The EU's executive Commission was negotiating with Belgium's government and assessing whether the list of more than 1,000 farms that used some of the 176,000 pounds of dioxin-laced animal feed was sufficient to start freeing up part of the Belgian food market again.
"The list is now final," said Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, ending days of insecurity. Now that the farms have been pinpointed, the government hopes it will be easy to trace any contaminated meat, eggs and byproducts.
The government and leading opposition parties also agreed to set up a special inquiry commission to investigate how cancer-causing dioxins ended up on Belgian dinner plates so easily. Dioxin is a byproduct of the manufacture of some herbicides and pesticides.
The health minister blamed the lack of controls on the products that went into animal feed. Checks on food come under three politicized ministries.
Two officials from the company that provided the animal feed fattener that most likely contained the dioxin remained under arrest on fraud charges. Prosecutors said Monday the pollution could not have been caused by a leak in a mechanical oil tank, increasing the likelihood of fraud.
The scandal was also tearing at the center-left coalition ahead of Sunday's elections. The farm ministry has traditionally been a fiefdom of Dehaene's Christian Democrats and the Socialists said they were outraged how the scandal could take so long to solve.
Belgium's health and farm ministers resigned last week after it became clear they had known about the problem for a month without informing the public or the prime minister.:
