It took some of our farmers less than 24 hours after the first outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) last week to demand an immediate and comprehensive culling of Britain’s ramblers, dogs, badgers, Defra vets, tourists, van drivers, biochemists, etc etc. It is not enough that we should subsidise our farmers once over; when misfortune occurs we should then further compensate them — and suffer in silence as they demand that footpaths be closed, wildlife exterminated and so on. They have not yet gathered, or do not care, that the meat industry is of minuscule importance to the economy compared to the tourism and leisure sectors; still less that the land upon which they rear their cattle is heavily supported by the taxpayer. You will remember those tricoteuse Welsh farmers howling for the slaughter of Shambo, the divine Hindu bull which, ten days ago, was indeed executed by lethal injection at their insistence because it suffered from bovine tuberculosis (though posed no threat whatsoever to commercial livestock). Well, you mess with the gods at your peril. The score now stands at about Krishna 150–Farmers 1, after extra time, and Krishna may not have finished yet. My guess is Shambo was promptly reincarnated — as the gently enraged worshippers at Skanda Vale proclaimed he would be — as an infected cow, somewhere in the Guildford area. ‘This’ll teach the bastards,’ he is probably sniggering to himself, before being slaughtered and reincarnated again, maybe as Ben Bradshaw. We can only hope that one of those scary Hindu smallpox deities doesn’t attempt to wreak revenge on the NFU as well, out of solidarity.
The last FMD outbreak, back in 2001, ended up costing us (rather than the farmers) some £8 billion, excluding revenues lost through damage to our tourism industry. As European Union officials pointed out rather drily, while steadfastly refusing to chip in with 60 per cent of the cost, the government and the taxpayer were taken for a ride by both the farmers and the contractors (who dispatched seven million animals at often extortionate cost). Did any farmer end up out of business or even out of pocket after the 2001 debacle — a debacle, it is worth reiterating, that was brought on farmers by, er, farmers? This time around, the farmers were quick to blame the government for having not ‘learnt the lessons’ of 2001. But an Audit Commission report in 2005 suggested that enormous progress had been made by Defra, although a promised new computer system was not yet in place. Meanwhile, the Commission maintained, the farmers were still cheerfully purchasing illegal meat supplies from the Continent for cattle feed, the precise cause of the previous outbreak. So who, exactly, has failed to ‘learn the lesson’?
The present outbreak may indeed be the result of escaped contaminants from the Pirbright Institute for Animal Health laboratory, just three miles from the farm where the first outbreak occurred. Or, far more likely, from the adjacent Merial site where there’s been plenty of work on FMD in the last year or so. It is suspected that the unusual strain of FMD is the same as that being investigated at the company’s lab. Merial is a perfectly reputable private firm, a French-US agglomerate created by the merger of Merck Inc and Rhone-Poulenc a few years back, its spiritual home in Lyon but its worldwide headquarters in Essex. It leases its lab site at Pirbright from the Institute for Animal Health but is solely responsible for its own security. It is the only lab in the country with a licence to research live FMD and its security procedures have to be pretty stringent. Truth be told, there is not much evidence — despite the inevitable, kneejerk caterwauling and conspiracy theory nonsense — that the firm has been anything but stringent. It was last inspected by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’s Vaccine Bank in February of this year and apparently no problems were recorded. It is true that during the previous outbreak, back in 2001, there were mutterings that Pirbright employees visited pubs and used footpaths ‘despite a requirement of quarantine after handling viruses’ and described biosecurity there as ‘fairly relaxed’.
Building work has been in progress at the Merial site and a Health and Safety Executive inspection, being undertaken as we went to press, may quite possibly discover some lapse. But even if it does, you would be hard-pressed to shift the blame on to the government: the requisite inspections, by three separate bodies (DEFRA, the Health and Safety Executive and the Home Office) have been carried out to the letter. Some farmers have complained about the close proximity of the Pirbright lab to large fields full of peacefully grazing, blissfully unaware bovines. But biotech work and innovation has to take place somewhere. The farmers, presumably, would prefer for it to be undertaken in the middle of a large city. And any planning objections should be referred to Woking Borough Council.
David Cameron, meanwhile, has asserted that the Merial lab is ‘inspected and licensed by the government’. I do not know what is intended by this remark. Does he mean that the government should not have licensed Merial to carry out its important work, and while doing so employing hundreds of British people? Or that it should not have inspected the site? Or perhaps inspected the site and found it wanting, simply for the sheer hell of it? Cameron went on to offer comment on the grave irony of a lab designed to prevent FMD actually being the cause of it. But it is not that much of an irony really, when you think about it, is it, Dave? The rural lobby has been flexing its muscles too; Clive Aslet, ‘editor at large’ of the rural middle-class property-porno mag, Country Life, has suggested that the relationship between Merial and Defra is ‘unclear’ (it seems perfectly clear to me, mate, and I am an ignorant townie) and that there have been incidences of problems at the Institute of Animal Health before, which he details. Well maybe, Clive — but it looks as though this particular problem has not originated at the Institute of Animal Health, but from a private company. So what’s your gripe, then?
Where the government might cop a little blame, though, is in a certain reluctance to sanction vaccinations of healthy cattle. It has the notion in its collective head that vaccinations somehow ‘hide’ FMD in herds, which seems to be based more upon superstition than observable scientific fact. However, it may be based upon a reluctance to fling more taxpayer money down the ravenous maw of livestock farming, which I reckon is something to be commended.
