LUXEMBOURG, April 23 (Reuter) - European Union consumer ministers shot down on Tuesday French and Austrian calls for a system of regional labels on beef guaranteed to be free of mad cow disease. The ministers said the plan would hinder the EU's single market and they preferred tighter and more unbiased controls as a way of reassuring consumers. "In all of our member states the controls are carried out by state bodies and sometimes these state bodies are biased in the weight of industries' interests," the EU's Consumer Affairs Commissioner Emma Bonino told a closing news conference. She said the system of regional labels proposed was not "a tremendous idea". Austria and France had said the labels should not show the country, but regions which were guaranteed free of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), known popularly as mad cow disease. Diplomats said a number of countries, including Germany, Spain, the Italian EU presidency and Belgium, had spoken against the regional label plan. The beef industry has be

en in crisis for the past month since Britain announced that humans could develop the brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease by eating beef from cattle infected with BSE. A week later the European Commission imposed a woprldwide ban on exports of British beef.