Articles from George Monbiot & Simon Jenkins

[The Land Is Ours]

George Monbiot
Thursday March 29, 2001
The Guardian

Last week a friend working in Kenya explained Britain's foot and mouth 
policy to a Maasai cattle herder. The nomad found our approach horrifying 
and hilarious in equal measure. His first objection was that all cattle 
belong to the Maasai, and no one had asked their permission. Then he wanted 
to know why Britain found it so hard to suppress a disease which the Maasai 
had learnt to control generations ago. When my friend explained that we 
were hoping to start selling our meat abroad once more, he was mystified: 
"Why on earth would you want to do that?" he asked. This is a good 
question, which we in Britain have so far failed to ask, let alone to answer.

Yesterday, the Times suggested that our meat exports are worth "up to £1bn 
a year". As usual, the paper of record seems to be making it up as it goes 
along. The Ministry of Agriculture's figures for last year show that we 
exported £310m worth of cattle, pigs and sheep to the European Union, and 
next to nothing elsewhere. Interestingly, this figure represents a decline 
of 39% from 1999. If this trend continues, our exports will dwindle to zero 
in three years' time. But it won't continue. Foot and mouth, for most 
foreign buyers, is the final straw, confirming their well-founded suspicion 
that our farming is unsafe. There is no guarantee that exports will resume 
at all when the UK is declared free from disease.

Most of our livestock sales, moreover, are subsidised, by both headage and 
export payments. The truckers who drive them around are also state 
assisted, as their fuel and road taxes now pay only some 80% of the costs 
they impose on the Exchequer. Livestock sales, in other words, are likely 
to cost the country more than they make.

So parts of the countryside have been declared off limits, the tourist 
industry has been all but obliterated, rare breeds have been slaughtered 
and hundreds of businesses have been closed to protect an industry which is 
worth not £1bn a year, not £570m as ministers have claimed, not even the 
£310m that Maff figures show, but, in all probability, less than nothing.

Surely then, there must be other reasons for the government's declaration 
of war with Britain's sheep? One compelling argument is that Europe insists 
we stamp out the disease. But the European rules - which arose, anyway, 
from the British insistence on curtailing foot and mouth through mass 
slaughter - are designed to protect trade between member states. Were we to 
abandon our fantasy animal exports, then the requirement would become 
obsolete.

Foot and mouth disease does have implications for animal welfare. In 
extreme cases, livestock suffer gravely from the lesions on their mouths 
and feet. But we can put down animals in this condition without having to 
slaughter the entire herd, let alone the healthy stock on surrounding 
farms. Indeed, one of the many idiocies of the mass slaughter programme is 
that animals in distress are reached no faster than animals which aren't 
suffering at all: it prolongs pain, rather than relieving it. The selective 
culling of badly infected stock, moreover, is likely to lead to an 
improvement in disease resistance, which many of our over-developed new 
breeds are now woefully lacking. Any suffering caused by foot and mouth 
would surely be offset by terminating the cruel and unnecessary live 
transport of animals to other countries.

There is no doubt that foot and mouth will also lead to reduced yields of 
milk and meat, but it's hard to understand why this should be considered a 
problem. Thanks to overproduction, the EU has introduced a quota system 
which ensures that every time we buy a pint of milk, we have to pay two 
pence over the market price.

The benefits of endemic foot and mouth, by contrast, must surely be 
obvious. It would encourage farmers to develop local markets for their 
produce, which is the only strategy which makes both economic and 
environmental sense. It would reduce the number of lorries on the roads. It 
would persuade breeders to phase out strains with poor resistance to 
disease and inherent welfare problems, and return to hardier types which 
don't require such intensive management.

So the government's decision to start vaccinating livestock should be 
opposed, on the grounds that it might eliminate foot and mouth from 
Britain. The ministry should continue to spread the disease around as 
rapidly as possible, by pursuing a slaughter programme it doesn't have the 
capacity to implement, leaving piles of rotting animals strewn around the 
countryside, then setting fire to them so that the virus is lifted into the 
jetstream and widely dispersed. If the vaccination programme is successful, 
then, as an urgent strategic priority, the government should reinfect the 
country forthwith


Why do we let these farmers blackmail us?
SIMON JENKINS, The Times
A strange thing is happening. I am beginning to sympathise with ministers 
over foot-and-mouth.The Labour Government is being held to ransom by 
livestock farmers much as Tory Governments were held to ransom by 
coalminers. Farming communities cry in aid of the same "national interest". 
They evince the same emotive support from the media. Ministers have no 
friends and no clue which way to turn. Yesterday I heard Tony Blair in 
bizarre Churchillian mode, pledging himself to "strain every sinew" to 
defeat foot-and-mouth (FMD). He was unconvincing. Terrorised by demands for 
a "disease-free national herd", he seemed at the mercy of his vacillating 
vets. These scientists, he should remember, live as bondsmen to the 
livestock industry and its profitability. They have done well from his 
abattoir policy. Now they have reduced him to a pastiche of a wartime 
general, implying that no price is too high to protect livestock profits, 
no price too horrendous to the taxpayer or rural economy. He will kill 
everything that moves, if that is what vets want. This is not just bad 
government. It is intellectually daft.

Mr Blair seems to forget that FMD is rare among industrial pollutants in 
having no impact on public health.Despite the media hysteria, not a single 
human being and not a single animal has died of this illness. Previously 
infected meat and milk are perfectly safe. Lord Bragg joined the pack in 
hailing FMD in this paper yesterday as "this fearful plague . . . this 
demon reaching into the heartlands and hills thought deeply safe, a serial 
killer, a predator at large". I wonder how he would describe the Black 
Death or the Holocaust. FMD was endemic in the Lake District of his 
lordship's fiction. The only serial killer today is government policy. That 
is a disease all right, but one of the brain. Most of my profession seems 
to be suffering. Last week the ever-gullible BBC filmed a farmer close to 
tears over the possible loss of his beloved cattle to the slaughter policy. 
It then showed him finding out that they were safe and driving them 
straight round to the local abattoir. There followed astonishing scenes of 
Jeremy Paxman and the leader of the National Farmers' Union, Ben Gill, 
commiserating over what they seemed to think was a nuclear disaster. 
Farmers may be able to fool Newsnight each evening, but can they really 
fool the rest of the nation? The lobbyists protest that the slaughter 
policy is a matter of animal welfare. This is rubbish. If they cared about 
welfare, they would vaccinate their animals. Animals are not vaccinated, as 
Nick Brown has admitted, because it would cost the farmers dear in export 
potential. This debacle is not about human health, nor about animal 
welfare. It is about money. As the veterinary historian, Abigail Wood, 
pointed out in The Times this month, FMD used to be endemic throughout 
Europe and is on most other continents. The disease rarely lasts more than 
a fortnight, is seldom fatal and grants its victims a measure of immunity. 
Farmers used to regard it as an irritant and lived with lower yields where 
it occurred.

In the middle of the last century, a group of pedigree herd owners demanded 
a slaughter policy to protect their investment. It was only then that a 
reluctant Whitehall asked the industry overall whether it wanted to end the 
policy of toleration. Officials actually took a vote, the pedigree owners 
defeating ordinary farmers by a majority. Britain later forced the policy 
on to the rest of Europe and ministers have had to enforce it during any 
outbreak. This was expensive in 1967 and is even more so today. But the 
dead animals are
the result of a policy, not a plague..Illness does not kill cows, people do.

Mr Brown describes this policy as a "matter of life and death" to the 
farming industry. He has been conned. Even if it stood a chance of working, 
his containment policy was undermined by farmers ferrying livestock round 
the country at breakneck speed,at least some of them knowing that the 
animals might be infected. There was no evidence that Mr Brown's 
devastating February 26 plea to the nation, "Do not venture into the 
countryside", impeded FMD any more than does straw doused in diluted 
disinfectant. It was a solidarity gesture to farmers, with no thought of 
consequence because Mr Brown is not Tourism Minister.

How can the millions lost in livestock exports be worth billions in lost 
tourism? This is a Cabinet so un-joined up that it cannot connect a farm 
and a bed and breakfast, or a flock of sheep and a coachload of children. 
As the admirable Rory Bremner points out, the present collection of 
ministers associate farms
with vineyards and olive groves.

Both BSE and FMD were the result of faulty farming practices,but only BSE 
killed people. FMD appears to have entered the national herd through 
illegal imports, abetted by livestock intensification under subsidy. The 
Welsh hills now carry five times more sheep than 30 years ago, reducing the 
uplands to a monoculture of shorn grass. The sheep lobby yesterday 
threatened that the Lake District "would be
reduced to scrub", if not grazed by sheep in the manner approved by Wordsworth.

This is nonsense. It would revert to the gorse, heather and ecological 
diversity which Wordsworth and successive visitors enjoyed, before Europe's 
farmers won protection from New World imports and turned the uplands into 
lawns. In which case let us struggle to look on the bright side. A fall in 
sheep numbers would be a wholly good thing for the environment of what are 
now grossly overstocked hills. Farmers are being compensated, far more than 
any of the businesses that their lobbying for the slaughter policy is now 
bankrupting. If the mass cull goes ahead, it will send restocking prices 
soaring and bring considerable profit to others in the same industry. The 
proposed controls on live animal transport should also see a return to 
smaller abattoirs and more local meat marketing. In addition, farmers might 
eventually be more sympathetic to non-agricultural rural industries. The 
nation as a whole might take tourism more seriously.

Better still would be a realisation that policies can become obsolete. 
Disease can never be eradicated from Europe's overbred, overstocked farms, 
if only because protectionist farm policies have made illegal meat imports 
hugely profitable. Holding livestock prices with slaughter binges may 
simply prove too much for Britain's political economy to stomach. If the 
public can live with meat imported from FMD countries such as Argentina, 
farmers may have to tolerate the disease at home, insuring or vaccinating 
against it at will. Britain may not be able to export its livestock for 
some time, perhaps for ever, and revert to consuming what it produces at 
home. That is not the end of the world. It was once unthinkable that Britain
would not be exporting ships or volume cars. Change comes to every industry.

Farmers claim that the rural economy depends on their unique output, a 
farmed landscape. I have sympathy with this claim. Farmers remain the best 
hope for long-term rural custodianship. But there are limits. A balance 
must be found between livestock yields and the far more important return to 
tourism and recreation. Visitors enjoy the landscape not because animals 
are FMD-free but because it is undeveloped. They enjoy walking the hills 
not because pedigree herds are exportable but because
open hills are precious lungs of nature. The future of the countryside may 
depend to a degree on profitable livestock, but not beyond the bounds of 
common sense. In the forthcoming debate on this subject, common sense about 
food and farming will be crucial. Killing millions of animals in a futile
attempt to maintain profits is hardly a good preamble to that debate.

So let us repeat, foot-and-mouth is nothing to do with public health. No 
vet has said so. No minister has said so.No farmer has said so. Nor is it 
about animal welfare. If it were, farmers would have vaccinated long ago. 
Foot-and-mouth may touch the heartstrings of the stockman and the 
journalist. But the livery girl is just as hurt by a bankrupt stable, the 
hotelier by a bankrupt lodge and the cook by a bankrupt restaurant. They 
too have a national interest.

This slaughter is no act of God. It is an act of Government in thrall to 
one industry. This is about money, money and more money.




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