MEPs vote to keep strict disease controls

MEPs meeting in Strasbourg yesterday voted by a massive majority to keep at bay any risk of importing animal disease by preventing live animals being brought into a number of countries in Europe.

Welcoming the decision, Alyn Smith MEP said: "Disease control is a crucial issue that people only pay attention to when it goes wrong, and any farmer knows how grave the consequences of it going wrong could be."

However, he said the danger of an open door policy still exists as yesterday's vote only allowed five of the member states, including the UK, to continue their stricter anti-disease measures for animals entering their country.

The derogation had been about to expire as part of that ongoing harmonisation. The UK also has another thread in the argument as long as the danger of importing rabies continues to be classified as "non-negligible".

Even so, Smith expressed his worries over "the ongoing drift towards harmonising animal control standards across the EU".

He said: "Scotland and the UK are a series of islands so we have a natural barrier to animal disease, and the laws should reflect that. I'm concerned that the attitude from some in Brussels is that we should continue to justify our rules, when the reverse is true, they should have to justify any attempts to harmonise."

• NFU Scotland yesterday issued a reminder to the more than 1,000 farm tenants who had registered an interest in buying their farms under the Land Reform Act that these registrations were only valid for five years. As a result, some of them may be due for renewal.

The right to buy only comes into effect if the landowner puts the property on to the market. So far about 1,000 of the 5,000 or so tenants eligible to register such an interest have done so.