Andrew Arbuckle: Just as things on the farm seemed to be going so well...

IN WHAT was otherwise a quite upbeat week with the sheep industry showing faith in the future by buying new sires for their flocks, I have been somewhat downcast.

There is also a spring in the step of the cereal producers even if few can honestly claim to have sold the majority of their crop at the top end of the market. The harvest has been taken relatively easily so far, although there is still an acreage of second wheats and oats to be taken. So it is not that sector that has brought on my cloud of darkness.

What worries me is that I believe the figures released last week which showed another nine cases of dickeya, a serious bacterial disease affecting potatoes, prove without a shadow of doubt the disease now has a good grip in all the main potato growing areas of Scotland.

Add to that the fact that this disease which can wreck havoc in the growing crop is now endemic in most parts of England.

There must be a massive amount of glee in Holland at seeing Scotland, their main competitor in the seed potato export market, now having dickeya found in 32 fields throughout the country. They know at first-hand how their industry has been devastated by the disease. They know their industry lost some €40 million in value through dickeya a few years back.

There may well be more cases of dickeya in Scotland. Field inspections are no more foolproof than taking tuber samples in store. The reality is the inspectors in both cases see a very small percentage of the crop. I am sure there is more dickeya around, it has just not been picked up.

I know the Scottish Government and the Potato Council were both keen to cover last week's bad news with the fact that no cases had been found in crops where Scottish seed had been planted.

Yes, that is good news but the position now is that there is dickeya in the good lands of Strathmore, the coastal fringe of the East Neuk of Fife, the so called golden mile on the coast of Angus, the fertile parts of the Lothians and on good land near Banff.

All of those infected areas are surrounded by other farms growing seed. On some of the infected farms there are also seed crops. The machinery and storage are common and this makes disease transmission into the seed crop quite easy.

Every one of the infected farms will drain into some burn, stream or watercourse and this has already been highlighted as a possible source of disease spread as the dickeya bug enjoys going for a swim. No irrigation will be allowed if the disease is found. If or when this happens you can expect to neighbours falling out because in most years, irrigation is essential to achieving a full crop of potatoes.

There is no need to go over the already known method by which the disease has come into the country.Nothing illegal was done. The introduction was achieved purely as a consequence of commercial priorities.

In order to give their supermarket customers a marketing edge with a monopoly of a named variety, one pre-packer brought the seed in from England. Nothing illegal in that, I stress. There are also the cases of dickeya found in East Lothian which came via a different source; that of a merchant bringing in a variety for the chipping market.

So there we are: a multi million seed potato business threatened and possibly disabled by some of the major retailers who wanted an edge in the market.

Those of another generation might recall wart disease going through the potato crop in the early years of the 20th century. It took more than one generation to get on top of that problem.

I have in one form or another been involved in the Scottish potato industry for the past 50 years. I cannot recall any other potential disaster on a scale such as this.

On Friday, Richard Lochhead, the rural affairs minister, was keen to stress the efforts that will be made by the Scottish Government but he admitted the chances of stopping certified seed coming into Scotland seemed remote with the EU reluctant to support anything that even sniffed of creating a trade barrier.

Perhaps the time is ripe for our politicians to argue for some independent organisation to be set up in Europe to decide where a country's livelihood is threatened by the possibility of disease coming in, and then a health barrier can be erected.

That would prevent member states setting up trade barriers to protect their own industries purely for political reasons.