Germany wants tough legal action in dioxin affair

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany on Sunday called for tough legal action against those responsible for contaminating food with carcinogenic dioxin, while authorities gave a clean bill of health to the majority of farms closed earlier as a precaution.

Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner called the conduct that led to excessive levels of the highly toxic chemical entering animal feed, causing bans on some farm goods, a "criminal act."

"This is a big blow for our farmers. They have totally innocently been dragged into this situation by the sick machinations of a few people," she said in an interview with Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

"It is tough to shake off the suspicion, given what we know so far, that criminal energy was combined with an alarming unscrupulousness. The judiciary must clamp down hard."

German prosecutors investigating the company responsible for contaminating feed with dioxin have already said they may bring criminal charges against the firm, a distributor of oils for animal feed production known as Harles und Jentzsch.

The resulting health scare began last week when it was revealed that some eggs from German farms where hens ate dioxin-tainted feed had been contaminated, and authorities said some poultry and hog feed had been contaminated since March.

Operations at 4,700 German farms were shut down last week and thousands of hens culled in eight German states to try to prevent food supplies being contaminated by the tainted meal.

But authorities had made much progress towards reopening them by Sunday.

The state of Lower Saxony said only 1,470 of the 4,400 farms it closed would remain shut pending further tests.

"All available data was used to make a solid risk analysis and identify the farms from which food products pose no risk at all to consumers," said Friedrich-Otto Ripke, the region's state secretary for agriculture and consumer protection.

Consumers who may have eaten affected products should not expect adverse side effects, a statement from the state added.

Dioxins are toxins formed by burning waste and by other industrial processes and have been shown to contribute to higher cancer rates and to affect pregnant women.

On Saturday, the agriculture ministry said excessive levels of dioxin had also been found in some German poultry, although the tainted chicken meat was not sold and the hens in question were killed and their carcasses destroyed.

The scare has led to temporary import bans on German meat and poultry products in South Korea and Slovakia, and a drop in demand for eggs. A survey by Bild am Sonntag showed one in five Germans were avoiding their beloved soft-boiled breakfast egg.

A spokesman for the German agriculture ministry called Slovakia's decision "unfounded and thus entirely unacceptable."

South Korea, which imported a total 6,266 tonnes of German pork in 2010, said however that German livestock products had not been found to be contaminated.

Another German state, Saxony-Anhalt, said on Sunday that four tests it ran on samples of pork revealed none containing levels of dioxin over the legal limit.

Officials and farmers organisations have called for damages to be paid out to farms forced to halt sales over the scare, but Minister Aigner on Sunday expressed reservations.

"It would be wrong to start a race for claims," she said in comments published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeiting.

(Additional reporting by Holger Hansen; Writing by Brian Rohan; Editing by Jon Hemming)

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