As the number of cases of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK rose to 36 by the morning of 2 March 2001 - with more expected over the coming week - the mood in the media is one of impending national disaster. But how bad is the situation for the UK's farmers?
|
Some have argued that farmers brought the outbreak upon themselves, through the rigorous pursuit of farming intensification. But Séan Rickard, senior economist at the Cranfield School of Management, is not convinced: 'The idea that it is a curse on intensive farming is just waffle. Modern farming has provided us with cheap, safe and good-quality food. The idea that when we had small farms in the past it was an idyllic life is mythical - farming was a tough and meagre existence.'
|
And when you consider that foot-and-mouth disease was a frequent problem for British farmers prior to 1967, and since then has become a rare occurrence, the suggestion that this latest outbreak was caused by modern practices seems bizarre.
|
But while Rickard's defence of modern farming may curry favour with many of the UK's beleaguered farmers, his views on the potential impact of foot-and-mouth on the farming industry are less likely to please. On 27 February 2001 Rickard appeared on a BBC Newsnight debate with Ben Gill, president of the National Farmers' Union (NFU), and a Scottish MEP who is also a hill farmer. Rickard's argument that the scale of the problem for the farming industry had been 'grossly exaggerated' did not go down well with his co-panellists.
|
But speaking to Rickard I found that he has not only done his homework - he also speaks from an authoritative position. Prior to joining the Cranfield School of Management he was chief economist for the NFU, where he worked for 16 years.
|
Individual farmers will certainly suffer the consequences of the outbreak. Rickard is keen to express sympathy for 'anybody who has animals destroyed', pointing out that, for a farmer with a pedigree herd, destruction of his animals would mean 'destruction of a lifetime's work, which no amount of compensation would offset'. Yet based on an objective assessment of the economic facts he firmly believes that 'people have overreacted', and that the economic impact of the disease 'is not going to be anywhere near the two, three and four billion pound figures' which have been bandied about.
|
As a former chief economist for the NFU Rickard is well aware of the union's need to highlight the plight of farmers and to fight their corner. But as he 'sat and watched almost all objectivity fly out of the window', he felt the need to put things into perspective.
|
Rickard believes that the action taken to contain foot-and-mouth disease will bring an end to any new cases in 'five to six weeks'. He is not a vet, but his views are consistent with those of the government's chief veterinary scientist Jim Scudamore, who expects the number of cases to rise by about six to eight a day in the first week of March, before hopefully tailing off. This is because the ban on the movement of animals should mean that further outbreaks will be limited to secondary infections on farms close to those where foot-and-mouth has already occurred. This would make it very different to 1967, when the number of cases exploded in week two.
|
Rickard's main interest is in the likely financial impact of foot-and-mouth on the farming industry and its ability 'to bounce back'. He describes as a 'travesty' the way that discussion of farmers' pitiful incomes always revolves around official averages - currently £5200 - pointing out that this figure is 'not very representative', because '47 percent of farmers contribute only 2.8 percent of total output, while the largest 20 percent produce about 60 percent of output'. As a result, the average farm income is weighed down by this 47 percent who do not earn their living just from farming, but have other means of employment. He stresses that although the farming industry has suffered from low prices in the past three years, 'in the previous three years farm incomes were unusually high' and, until now, 'incomes have been recovering since last autumn'.
|
Rickard's analysis suggests that the beef and sheep sectors will be least affected: 'farmers who have their animals destroyed will be compensated to their market value.' And for the remaining farmers, the biggest problem is the delay in taking their animals to market: 'over the next four or five weeks farmers would have sold at most 15 percent of their animals. Their losses are restricted to the extra feeding costs for this period and any difference in the final price they get to market, which is difficult to predict either way.' (It could end up higher or lower, with about 40 percent of the revenue already guaranteed through subsidies.)
|
For the pig sector the issues are different - they are not being offered compensation (only money to get out of the industry), and a delay in taking pigs to market is a bigger problem because they are prepared for market with a particular date in mind, after which they lose value. But even here Rickard insists on a clearer perspective, pointing out that following the outbreak of swine fever in 2000, thousands of pigs were destroyed, 'but pig sector income still rocketed up' because 'the short period it takes to breed new pigs allows for a quick recovery'.
|
For dairy farmers whose herds become infected the costs could be more significant, due to the loss of income from selling their milk. Rickard believes the worst-case scenario is that the industry as a whole will sustain losses of around £15million a week if an export ban is placed on milk as well as meat. While clean countries (those free of foot-and-mouth) outside the European Union may not allow meat from the UK to be imported until six months after the last outbreak, Rickard points out that the vast majority of the UK's exports go to countries within the EU, for which the timescale for lifting the ban would be more like three to four weeks. So foot-and-mouth would have to persist for over a year for the economic costs to the farming industry to reach anything like the sorts of figures being discussed.
|
As for the knock-on costs for non-farmers, Rickard has mixed feelings, pointing out that people working in abattoirs and food-processing plants have 'already been laid off', and that there is an impact for hauliers. But he is critical of the clamour for compensation: 'where do we stop, what about the bookies at Cheltenham? It all gets faintly ridiculous.'
|
According to Rickard, the best way forward is for the farming industry to deal with this setback and to push ahead with further intensification. This will benefit both consumers and those working within the industry: 'If farm earnings are going to keep pace we must apply modern techniques in the industry, which means fewer people and more machines and technology.'
|
But such a pragmatic and objective approach jars with our sentimental times. Foot-and-mouth is a genuine problem for farmers and may well cause genuine hardship for some. But turning a problem which the farming industry is capable of dealing with into a national crisis will help nobody. A positive vision of the future, embracing change and our ability to deal with problems, would be far more helpful than treating the first sign of difficulty as the start of national doom.
|
Tony Gilland is science and society director at the Institute of Ideas. He is the editor of Science: Can You Trust the Experts?, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); Animal Experimentation: Good or Bad?, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); and Nature's Revenge?: Hurricanes, Floods and Climate Change, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)). He is also a contributor to Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
Read on:
Foot-and-mouth disease - let's come to our senses by Tony Gilland
Read more on the Foot-and-mouth issue
|
