Andrew Arbuckle: Laissez-faire attitude to rules start of road to ruin

EVEN although it was not a pleasant period for the farming world, cast your mind back to the autumn of 2001. If you remember, the foot-and-mouth outbreak was still going through parts of the UK like wildfire, bringing with it death to tens of thousands of sheep, cattle and pigs.

In order to control the spread of the disease, the government ordered a virtual standstill on livestock movements – by autumn sheep farmers found that they were not even allowed to drive their tups across a public road to a field full of ready and waiting ewes.

This was where a bit of ingenuity was called for and a number of ploys were implemented.

One desperate farmer decided to give his prize tup a little trip across the road inside his big round baler.

Another stuck his ram in the passenger seat of the pick-up. To give this cunning plan a little authenticity in case the local constabulary were patrolling the roads, he stuck a headscarf on the animal. The farmer recalled later that the end result looked a little like his mother-in-law, but the tup's performance was not affected by this potential slur.

Another dodge saw a farmer put several tups in the family caravan to transport them to the ewes. All was well until a motorist following the caravan saw the heads of several sheep peeking through the curtains.

All this illicit travel was brought to mind last week, when government inspectors found disease on a batch of seed potatoes imported from England to the heartland of Scottish potato-growing in Perthshire.

This incident occurred despite the strong support from within the seed potato sector for a voluntary ban on such imports. It also occurred despite the damage it could do to the multi-million-pound Scottish seed potato industry.

Amid the anger within the potato sector, there is an irony that the Scottish industry has benefited from the same disease destroying the Dutch crop.

So, once again we see farmers and merchants taking a chance with disease.

It is only a week or so since the latest livestock import figures showing a big increase on the previous year; this despite the exhortations and warnings of NFU Scotland on the dangers of importing bluetongue.

Similar concerns over importing tuberculosis by buying in dairy heifers from "hot spot" areas are also disregarded if the breeding and potential milk yield ticks the boxes.

The sheep industry is not exonerated from similar dangerous dealing where animal health is so far down the list of priorities that it seems not to exist at all. If that is doubted, then why has sheep scab swept through all the main sheep-producing areas of the country?

Farmers seem affected by tunnel vision on this issue. The wider dangers to their neighbours or indeed to the nation seem not to be of concern as long as they get the stock or the produce that they want.

The whole health issue both in livestock and plants in Scotland is not helped by EU rules on trade barriers and what feels at times like a lack of control over those rules.

A country whose farmers are under the cosh financially might highlight the danger a certain disease could bring and close the borders. The problem is in differentiating between bogus barriers to trade and barriers necessary to prevent animal and plant disease being freely transmitted across the continent.

As far as Scotland goes, I think our politicians should try once again to get firmer border controls to help preserve the "high health" status of parts of our farming industry, even though some farmers may feel that this would prevent them trading freely and without conscience.