Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the implications for his Department’s policies of the recent outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease in Hungary.

In response to the outbreak of FMD in Germany, this Government took decisive and rapid action to protect the UK by suspending the commercial import of susceptible animals and certain untreated products of animal origin from Germany and restricting personal imports of animal products from across the EU. Following the outbreak in Hungary, these border control measures were immediately extended to cover imports of these products from Hungary and Slovakia (given the close proximity of the Hungarian FMD case to the Hungarian Slovakian border).