Unnecessary human cost of foot-and-mouth

Published on Tuesday 16 October 2007 00:04

I RECENTLY watched a television documentary about the First World War. It portrayed respected generals employing tactics from previous battles because they knew no different, sending wave after wave of loyal, trusting men to their almost certain deaths in search of victory. It was done with the best intentions and tacticians offering the best advice, and did bring ultimate victory, but at terrible cost.

And so I have watched with increasing incredulity, frustration and now anger at the totally unnecessary disaster which has been created by a handful of cases of foot-and-mouth disease hundreds of miles away in Surrey. More importantly, the total mishandling of the response to this tiny outbreak has turned what should have been a local problem, once the disease source was known, into a crisis.

The 2007 battle for control of foot-and-mouth has been fought like the battle of 2001 even though the outbreak did not merit it. In an attempt to protect livestock from the disease, the authorities have unintentionally succeeded in creating an economic disaster far worse than the consequences of the disease itself. Soon this battle will no doubt be won, but like the First War, at what human cost?

Most of the reporting of this crisis has concentrated on movement restrictions, export bans and, more recently, on the welfare issues of lambs caught on hills and political fights surrounding compensation. What has been ignored is an appreciation of the desperate plight of the individuals caught up in this mess. This is not actually about zones, restrictions and bans, this is about people, families and mainly small rural business suffering catastrophic financial meltdown through no fault of their own.

The politics and the endless, needless and senseless bureaucratic processes have grabbed the headlines when, in fact, the real headline should be that this is a bigger economic disaster for livestock farmers, in particular sheep farmers, than the catastrophe of 2001. This financial disaster has spread into other parts of the rural economy including auctioneers and suppliers to farmers who have effectively become additional sources of credit facilities for farm businesses who simply cannot pay their bills, and their problems may just be beginning.

Explain to me how any industry, subsidised or not, could survive the consequences of losing access to markets for 50 per cent of its products at the only time of year that these markets are available, because of some uncontrollable event in a government laboratory four to five hundred miles away. It's like the Scotch whisky industry being banned from exporting half of its product for a year. What kind of response would that get from the industry, and indeed government?

Of course, suggest this to anyone outside farming and they can't believe or comprehend it. But make no mistake, this is happening as witnessed by the farmers who are phoning me night after night with heartbreaking stories of businesses on the edge of collapse all over Scotland.

How can, for example, a farmer from Argyll who sold all his lambs and draft ewes from an 1,100 ewe flock last year for 24,500 hope to survive when this year that sales income is 13,000 before costs? How can every sheep farmer in the country watch prices drop by at least 30-40 per cent for all classes of stock see any kind of future beyond next week, never mind next year?

This is an economic crisis in the sheep sector, the likes of which I have never seen, and it needs an appropriate and immediate intervention from government with financial assistance. Not spin, not rhetoric, not platitudes, not promises but hard cash.

• Jim Walker is a former president of NFU Scotland and a former chairman of Quality Meat Scotland.