The European Union knows the precise number of cows grazing its fields, but not the number of citizens in the 25 member states, its chief statistician has been quoted as saying.

Michel Vanden Abeele, director-general of statistics agency Eurostat, told Belgian newspaper L?Echo on Saturday that the EU?s leaders should stop demanding unnecessary data.

?Because of the mad cow disease crisis, we know the exact number of cattle in Europe. By contrast, we can?t give the precise number of people who live in the European Union?, he said.

There were 80,587,601 cows ? 20,271,497 of them dairy cattle ? in the EU at the end of 2001, the most recent year for which full figures are published on Eurostat?s Web site (http://europa.eu.int/comm/eurostat). Around 450 million people currently live in the EU.