Lifting a ban on feeding meat to animals could raise the spectre of "mad cow disease" and hit public confidence in the safety of British beef, farmers warned yesterday.

The European Commission (EC) is considering easing rules introduced to combat the spread of BSE 20 years ago to allow feed containing animal proteins.

It wants to reduce the cost of guarding against the disease, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and its human form, Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease (CJD), which has claimed 169 British lives since 1995.

In a consultation document, the Commission claimed the changes would be based on sound science and would reduce farmers' dependency on crop-based alternatives and their volatile foreign markets.

But the report admitted it was "impossible" to remove all risk of the disease entering the food chain.

David Ellis keeps more than 2,000 cattle on one of Cornwall's largest beef farms outside St Ives. He said he was concerned that changes could affect public confidence in beef.

"It took us years to get over the BSE crisis and we don't want to go back to square one," he said. "We don't want any mishap or doubt in the public mind.

"British beef is by far and away the best and we want to keep it that way."

Neil Parish, the Conservative MP for Tiverton and Honiton and a former EU agriculture committee chairman, said the public needed reassurance that there was no contamination of the meat and bone meal feed.

"What was so wrong before was that we were feeding meal back to the same species," said Mr Parish, who is also a dairy farmer. "The mills which produce these feeds are often in the same place and meal from poultry and pigs must be kept entirely separate from those for ruminants."

The key animal health control for BSE is the ban on feeding meat and bone meal produced from ruminants (cattle, sheep and goats) back to the same species.

Since the first case of BSE was discovered in 1986, 181,114 cattle have been diagnosed with the prion disease and four million culled.

The condition was sparked by cattle eating animal feed containing infected proteins from a sheep which had died of a related disease, scrapie.

At the height of the health and political crisis, the issue dominated the news headlines and the then government attempted to play down growing public health fears.

This led to the famous decision of then cabinet minister John Selwyn Gummer to publicly feed his four-year-old daughter Cordelia a burger to prove that beef was safe.

But in recent years there has been a sharp decline in reported cases in cattle, with numbers between 2007 and 2009 falling from 53 to nine.

The EC is currently awaiting new scientific evidence on allowing a "tolerable" level of animal proteins in feed from the European Food Safety Authority. It says it then may be possible to feed meat and bone from non-ruminants, such as pigs and chickens, to other non-ruminants.

The EC document – TSE Roadmap 2 – says: "Considering the transmission risk from BSE among non-ruminants is very unlikely, a lifting of the ban on the use of Processed Animal Protein from non-ruminants in non-ruminant feed could be considered, but without lifting the existing prohibition on intraspecies recycling."

Conservative MP George Eustice, whose family run an organic farm in his Camborne and Redruth constituency, described the plan as "a backward step".

He said: "We need to learn the lessons of the past and respect nature so we should not encourage feeding meat to herbivores."

Mr Eustice said he wanted animal welfare and food safety to be given "far greater weighting", adding that farming and food production is "about life itself".

The National Farmers Union said that with almost a third of UK livestock raised in the South West, regional concerns were understandable.

Spokesman Ian Johnson said: "Farmers just want to know that nobody is going to be put off their product - so much was shrouded in secrecy before and we don't want to go back to those days."