Menem’s meals-on-wheels

Date: 20/06/1996

Argentine President Carlos Menem was taking no chances during a visit to Europe last week - his luggage included a refrigerated consignment of Argentine beef, just in case.

Nothing unusual in that, said some of his officials when they arrived in Luxembourg for the first EU-Mercosur meeting: the presidential plane is often stocked with food for long journeys and no catering pack of Argentinian origin would be complete without beef.

The president did not, in fact, take a meal with EU ministers during his two-day trip to Luxembourg and Brussels, lunching with the Grand Duke on one occasion and privately in Brussels on the other, so we will never know whether he would have ordered something from his own supplies if a BSE-laden steak had been proffered.

One Argentinian agriculture official explained away the refrigerator, saying that Menem was going on from Brussels to Morocco where he would be making a sales pitch to the Moroccan government for Argentine beef.

Menem had no trouble with UK beef, he insisted, describing it as amongst the “best in the world”.

This last remark came from a special refrigerated consignment of flattering remarks designed to win allies in the UK. Perhaps Mr Major will use the endorsement in his arguments in defence of beef in Florence this weekend.