"...if we go the way of the coal and steel industries, there will be no way back.."

"if you want to see the future, just look at the west coast of Scotland .. the farmers had no other industry to rely on, ...all the animals have gone..." In the New Year, Alistair Davy and other farmers from Yorkshire were quoted in an article in the Yorkshire Post

" .... if the sheep and the cows are no longer grazing, it wouldn't take long for it to become impenetrable with bracken and bramble. For the last few years, the true picture of the problems facing agriculture have been masked...

"This is the last push," said Mr Davy. "I'm not doing it for me, I'm doing it for my son and for all those future generations who want to work. We are the last of the great industries to be wrecked, but if we go the way of the coal and steel industries, there will be no way back."

It is no longer a secret that the present UK government would like to be shot of farming altogether. On the January 3rd Today programme we heard that meetings convened by Defra had discussed whether UK farming was needed at all. Defra has dropped the word 'farming' from its title and, as global recession is at last being openly talked about, the UK government still talks glibly of being in a "post agricultural era" and seems to be worrying about one problem only. As British Wool Chairman, Frank Langrish, has said

"It's all part of Defra's policy to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases. The UK government believes a reduction in livestock numbers will have a marked effect on the statistics. This is the logic of the asylum, where the lunatics are now completely in charge."

The Treasury has no apparent interest in supporting farmers in a particularly difficult time and what little money there is for DEFRA is not going to be spent on helping to ensure the supply of safe home produced food. Instead, as Christopher Booker put it in Sunday's Telegraph, our leaders are committing us to a range of measures whose economic effects will be without precedent, particularly the astronomically costly "carbon trading" schemes - put in place at the very time when many now believe that global warming has considerably more to do with unusual sunspot activity than with CO2 emissions. And the newspaper www.thisiscornwall.co.uk put it like this

:"Environment Secretary Hilary Benn last night signalled a significant shift away from supporting farming and rural areas as his department vowed to focus its funding priorities on tackling climate change. Support for rural and farming businesses will be scrapped in favour of funding eco-projects in Africa and bankrolling inventions to provide alternatives to fossil fuels...."

One disastrous consequence of DEFRA's obsession with such things is that they have virtually lost the plot in controlling the animal diseases that threaten our livestock and our own, already dwindling, self sufficiency. The warmwell.com Bluetongue page catalogues a long series of blunders in the UK and EU as well as the inevitable march of the viral disease itself - a disease that appears to have spread as a result of global trading rather than global warming. What we are seeing with Bluetongue now is the result of a dithering ignorance and political game playing from the EU and from the governments of Member States that threaten the livestock industry of the whole of Northern Europe. It is an international problem, not - as one might believe from the brief insoucient articles in the UK press - merely a temporary problem for the farmers of England.

Once again, as with foot and mouth, we are seeing the results of

"... the unfounded suspicion that somehow vaccination allows animals to be infectious whilst concealing signs of clinical disease."

In her talk to farmers on the subject of Bluetongue last Friday, the virologist and farmer Dr Ruth Watkins spoke, with all the well founded frustration of the expert, about "the redundant rule" that vaccination is not allowed in the surveillance zone nor outside the surveillance zone in uninfected areas.

"... Why should we be afraid of using vaccination to prevent virus infection from spreading and establishing itself in new areas? Is this because of an unfounded suspicion that somehow vaccination allows animals to be infectious whilst concealing signs of clinical disease? We are back in the mid 20th century if we continue to act as though we are unable to diagnose virus infection unless we wait for a clinical case to take samples to the virology laboratory."

Her talk (new window) is clear and informative, should be printed out and read in full. What she says is an eye-opener too about why we are having to play catch-up with the disease, why vaccine production in Europe has been so long delayed and why vaccination is going to be incomplete until far more vaccine can be ordered and obtained and 95% coverage of domestic ruminants achieved. On the subject of DEFRA's decision to make cash-strapped farmers pay for vaccine and costs themselves, Ruth Watkins simply quotes the example of Jenner and the elimination of smallpox.

Jenner who was a country doctor, a general practitioner, was the first person to use a live vaccine virus to protect humans against smallpox in 1876.... The original live virus vaccine was taken from the udder of a cow called Blossom whose hide is framed and hangs on the library wall at St George’s Hospital where Jenner trained. Jenner foresaw and wrote that it would be possible to eradicate smallpox entirely from the world one day, and he was proven correct in 1977 when global eradication was declared complete. Global eradication would never have happened if each person had had to pay for their vaccine and their tests for smallpox."

Baaa ..... Humbug!

The cold winds do blow and we shall have snow ....and the Bluetongue midges - according to DEFRA decree today - will bite no more for a while. At least, this is what we and the midges have been told and the farmers, desperate to do some moving of stock at last, are not going to argue.

But what about the future of those sheep still abiding in the fields? How are they to be kept from succumbing to the Bluetongue infection-carrying culicoides of next Spring?

In its usual mixture of ponderous bossiness and defensiveness, DEFRA says:

"In keeping with the principles set out in the Bluetongue Control Strategy,which was developed in partnership with the farming industry, livestock keepers will be offered the opportunity to purchase vaccine from the vaccine bank..."

Which is all very well if you are one of the relatively well-off cattle farmers. Values have held up this year and will be expected to continue to do so next year. A farmer with a thousand head of beef cattle or 500 dairy cattle can be thought wealthy compared to the sheep farmers. But a sheep farm with a thousand ewes is not a wealthy farm at all. It's running at a loss and this year has been disastrous.

If we consider such a farm with 1000+ adult sheep, there will be nearly 2000 lambs just at the very time that bluetongue is going to return with a vengeance - as it did in Northern Europe this year. The virulence of its return there took everyone by surprise. If the vaccine is ready, now that a firm order has at last been placed by England (Wales has now ordered 2.5 million doses but Scotland has ordered none as far as we know,) 2 doses per animal at 50p a dose is the best case scenario. Sheep farmers like this then will be required to find £3000 to protect their animals. If vaccine turns out to be £1 a dose they will need £6000 - but these are animals who are worth pitiful amounts now.

The sheep farmers simply cannot afford it.

DEFRA seems wilfully ignorant of just how miserable the past months and years have been. Even more sheep farmers will give up - and having to take the decision to do so will be the worst kind of painful nightmare for them.

And for the country? We tend to take for granted the rural way of life and the sights and sounds of upland Britain. The uplands are there; a pastoral idyll to believe in. Most of us do not have to work to maintain it. But we treasure it and life is better just knowing that it is there.

How many people realise that an entire way of life is on a knife edge and the uplands could soon disappear? Does DEFRA understand this? As the Yorkshire farmer Alistair Davy says,

" if you want to see the future, just look at the west coast of Scotland .. the farmers had no other industry to rely on, ...all the animals have gone ......if the sheep and the cows are no longer grazing, it wouldn't take long for it to become impenetrable with bracken and bramble. For the last few years, the true picture of the problems facing agriculture have been masked..."

And why are the sheep farmers being told to pay when they simply do not have the means? The EU Commissioners have agreed to fund the first year's vaccination campaign with 100% costs of vaccines and 50% of the costs.

When DEFRA officialdom was challenged on this, the reply came back that if the UK accepted this offer there would be “other costs that would probably be greater". "Other costs" ?

Perhaps one reason why DEFRA has been so very silent on the question of the Brussels offer is because funding for vaccination is conditional on the traceability of the vaccinated animals. The EU has been very sniffy indeed about the UK's dithering over this. The UK's plans for a National Livestock database has been sputtering along for years.

In 2004, "Identifying and Tracking Livestock in England " was published by the National Audit Office (pdf). Pages 45 and 46 of that document show how - for years on end - previous reports from several different concerned bodies, had followed one after another, all urging an efficient system of traceability. In spite of this endless procession of good intentions, nothing of worth materialised. In February 2004, following the NAO report, the Public Accounts Committee gave Sir Brian Bender and co the sort of hard time that never gets reported in the media and ought to be. One Treasury Minute response to the PAC conclusions also makes fascinating reading. Mr Gerry Steinberg, Labour MP for the city of Durham, prophetically asked Sir Brian Bender:

"You will not be coming back in two years' time and saying 'Well, the IT was difficult, we could not get the software'....?"

That was 2004. Sir Brian couldn't get the software.....

But it's the farmers who must now pay for this and other catalogues of failure.

We have to vaccinate the sheep. Other European countries are not in our situation. There, the cattle far outnumber the sheep and vaccinating the cattle and some sheep should confer a degree of protection on the whole animal population. 80% will do it. But in Britain the ratio of cattle to sheep is more like 25:75, the other way round. If sheep farmers can't afford to vaccinate then the sheep are not going to be vaccinated. That means that even if the cattle farmers do vaccinate the disease is not going to be stopped. Where are DEFRA's "other costs" then? It will cost many animals their lives and farmers their livelihoods. It will cost us the uplands. Bluetongue will be the death of sheep farming unless we can get the sheep vaccinated.

Cannot some way be found simply to by-pass DEFRA with all its inefficiency, its failure to comprehend farming, disease and its pitifully inadequate grasp of technology, virology and vaccination? Unless funding can somehow pass direct from the EU to the sheep farmers this will be the last Christmas for many whose simple satisfaction was to see their sheep safely graze.

"an odd way to save money"

The latest way DEFRA intends to save money: a £300 million "voluntary retirement" scheme to any DEFRA employee over 50 who wants to jump ship.
There is much jostling on the decks.
As one insider, quoted by the Evening Standard comments:

"They can't believe their luck. There are retirement parties all the time stretching into next spring. It seems an odd way to save money but no one is complaining. Some intend to take the money and then work in the private sector."

£300 million is also the amount of the fine Defra was ordered to pay by the EU for its shambolic handling of the RPA

£220,000 was the sum in tenders received in October 2006 for vital repairs to Pirbright

£520 million is what the failure to make the Pirbright site secure cost the sheep industry

£3.7 billion is, according to Lord Rooker, DEFRA's overall budget

The headline chosen for the Evening Standard: "Staff offered £40,000-a-year for life 'bribes' to quit shamed ministry Defra" Interesting that only the word "bribes" appears inside inverted commas; the word "shamed" can stand naked and alone. And as the ship of shame glugs its way further and further down into the muddied waters we are left wondering what will become of those so entangled by DEFRA's controlling ropes that they are unable to take any of the actions needed to save themselves.

Their brains are in their pockets

With the news that England (alone) is at least "tendering" for Bluetongue vaccine, we can see that the stable door is at least being approached. But those who would lock it are doing so in blindfolds and the horse is a speck on the horizon.

As always, the notion of actually using vaccination - the one method that works - seems to be simply too much for DEFRA to cope with. It has not ordered any vaccine. It has put out tentative feelers to both Merial and Intervet to ask how much money they want for their vaccines. How can the vaccine companies possibly give an answer if they don't know how much is going to be ordered across the EU? And how - we ask it through a megaphone - can DEFRA continue to keep Merial from its vital work at Pirbright when DEFRA's own appointed expert,Professor Spratt, says it has always been perfectly safe to work with Bluetongue virus there? Is Merial having to send its vital supplies away to France? This seems utterly absurd when every minute counts.

Inter-governmental sharing of information is not happening. DEFRA clearly does not know what other governments are doing in the matter of vaccine. Not surprising then that the Opposition is talking about Britain being "at the end of the queue"

But what queue? Why a queue? There is a lot of money available from the EU to cover costs. It is there to be applied for. Why all this talk of farmers paying? All governments affected by Bluetongue ought to be conferring and acting together - they ought to have done it months and months ago - to ensure that the vaccine companies were primed and ready to supply as much vaccine as needed for all. Without vaccine - for once all agree with this - there really is no hope of getting rid of the BTv-8 strain of virus.

"With every passing day, this map looks more like the opening credits of Dad’s Army..." said the NFUS. Even now, as the midges become more and more infected, European cooperation would help, would it not? Are governments talking to each other or not? It would seem not - since they are not acting in unison.


www.land-care.org.uk comments today:

"It would appear that the EC, who controls the use of vaccines throughout the EU, has been wasting endless time arguing about trade matters, rather than trying to get to grips with the disease itself. Why were our UK representatives at Brussels not insisting on a logical vaccination programme that could be delivered at a time when it would be most effective?"

It will have occurred to many others apart from ourselves and Land Care to wonder what the European Union is for if not to help Member States act in unison at such a time of crisis. The EU Commission had promised to pay 100% costs of vaccine and half the administration costs if a proper and coherent plan could be demonstrated. But practical help and expert advice cannot be expected from them. Member States are on their own. The onus therefore is on Member States to apply for this compensation and to comply with all that the EU demands.

Supporters of the EU claim that all this centralisation exists to facilitate issues of common advantage. The EU involves itself in everything from foreign policy to immigration. It has created a mountain of laws and a monstrosity of regulation. Why - with its huge budgets and expertise - can't it help its apparently hapless member states to formulate a policy - to get them talking and sharing information? What on earth is it really for?

Government spokesmen will sniffily assert that they are always acting in partnership "with industry". The truth is though that DEFRA tends to keep all its little consultation groups separate. Neither effective communication nor true consultation can really be said to be happening. DEFRA, like the EU itself, is now asking its "core stakeholders" to sort out its own response to Bluetongue.
It was Ruth Watkins who, as a working farmer herself but also a virologist, concerned at the piecemeal nature of the vaccination policy that seems to be envisaged, said this morning:

"...People will move unvaccinated (and possibly unknown to them infectious) animals out of the zone if they possibly can, illegally or legal movements or bust.. I shall be sorry if the unions let this happen. They are not guardians of the livestock industry but defenders of the interests of a few rich farmers.
Their brains are in their pockets..."

The vast majority of farmers are given no say at all over their own livelihoods. Real understanding of the disease and what should be being done seems as elusive as ever. Responsibility has been dumped onto farmers who are as in the dark as anyone else and now depending on the "core stakeholders" to know best. And it is the farmers, it seems, who must - in all senses of the word - pay the price.

We have to write

Dr Iain Anderson is once again going to chair a review of the Government's reaction to the 2007 Foot and Mouth Disease Outbreak. He has been asked to review lessons drawn from the 2001 outbreak and identify any others arising from the current outbreak. Comments have to be received by 16th November. See also www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk

The decision not to use emergency vaccination was astonishing. The handling by DEFRA illustrates the woeful lack of understanding within the Department of viral disease. All the conditions for immediate success had been met.
We knew the source.
We knew the strain.
We had the laboratory within arms length
and we knew the timescale.
The virus could have been stopped in its tracks within days by ring vaccination from the outside in.

2000 animals in Surrey would not have had to be slaughtered and nor would the obscenely termed "welfare culls" of half a million healthy hill lambs have been needed.

It seems highly likely that the EU would have been sympathetic to such emergency action and would have looked with favour on regionalisation of the immediate area so that the absurd situation of a general country-wide shut down need never have arisen. It could well have led to the outdated regulations receiving critical re-evaluation.

Because rapid on-site testing was not done except for antibodies, only a handful of the 2000 animals killed turned out to have been infected.


If people do not make these points there will be no barriers at all against yet another anodyne report being written and self-congratulation all round.
More at warmwell.com,

"Man has decidedly botched up the planet"

Most of the media continues to behave as if there is no problem. There is. An ever-descending black despair is with us. You cannot "snap out of" this one.

The stranglehold restrictions put in place to "control" foot and mouth and bluetongue show what happens if you allow animal health to pass out of the hands of those who know and care and into the surreal dreamworld of politics.
First came the EU legislation, the Directives and the Statutory Instruments. Then the 2002 Animal Health Act tidied up the loopholes. And then April Fool's Day this year saw the creation of "Animal Health" an outpost of Defra-world that merged - in the name of efficiency and as per the Hampton Review - the State Veterinary Service (SVS) the Dairy Hygiene Inspectorate (DHI), the Wildlife Licensing and Registration Service (WLRS,including the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species CITES), and the Egg Marketing Inspectorate (EMI).
Does anyone pretend that this was more than a money saving confidence trick?

Better animal health policies were not the aim. Just the determination to keep ever tighter controls on those producing food.

"We all welcome this merger," enthused Glenys Stacey, Chief Executive of the monster, using a Defra-dialect unknown in the civilised world, "it will deliver more comprehensively and with the customer in mind."

So, like passengers of British Rail, like wrongs hushed up, we are "customers", herded into a corner and comprehensively delivered into the iron grasp of DEFRA - for which we do indeed pay but for which there is no customer service. The only communications are glossy pamphlets with mind numbing demands for compliance or expressions of self congratulation (The Defra-slogan now seems to be "Enabling everyone to live within our environmental means" a piece of meaningless Defra-drivel for which we also undoubtedly paid.)
There is no remorse and no apology in Defra-world. And no criticism allowed. The 2002 Animal Health Act saw to that.

And so, with extreme sadness, we turn to this extract from an article online at www.countrylife.co.uk/blogs by Carla Carlisle with her ultimately doomed non-customer approach:

I am advised to 'check livestock twice daily'.
And this I do, taking buckets of extra feed, an apronful of windfalls, treats that make me welcome. We have two breeds. The Shetlands, small and gentle, look like the 'earth colours' section on paint charts. Born black, they evolve into taupe, chestnut, dark chocolate. If I sit on the ground, they come up to me, curious, concerned, and if I stay long enough, the older ewes lie down beside me. Then there are the Jacobs, dappled, scatty sheep with attention deficit disorders, courteous but wary.

I cannot claim that these sheep are vital to the financial future of this farm, but they provide a rhythmic sympathy with the earth that justifies everything we do here. They provide the grazing essential to the maintenance of the wildflower meadow.... Morning and evening, I check for signs of swelling and listen to the breathing beneath the symphony of crunching sheep nuts. And I pray for cold and rain. This depression doesn't feel like cowardice. It feels like the despair that André Gide described when he wrote that 'melancholy occasionally wins out: man has decidedly botched up the planet'. It is the despair of knowing that last winter was the second warmest on record, and there is no health in it.

Rules bending with the wind

An email from Alan Beat points out the curious case of the bending rules. Although EU rules state very firmly that exports may resume only when - in the case of non-vaccination - three months have elapsed since the last case -(rules that are agreed internationally by the OIE)- we now see Brazil (using vaccination)facing a 2 month ban only, for the FMD affected region only; while the UK (using slaughter only) can start trading again from unaffected regions just a few days after the latest case on October 12 (And there is of course no certainty that it will prove to be the last case, the bloody firebreak killing that went on around IP8 notwithstanding).
So Alan Beat asks why, if the rules can be broken to regionalise the affected and vaccinated area and restart trading everywhere else, this cannot happen in the UK too and vaccination be adopted instead of merely considered. "Or am I missing something?" he asks.

Oct 11 2007 ~ Dispatches from the front line 2007 October

"I regret that we are finding DEFRA absolutely unbending on almost every issue. We are having the threat of closure waved at us almost every day by jumped up little officials behaving like Nazi prison guards. Somehow they think we can control what clothes farmers wear to come ..... We understand the need for waterproofs but short of having a gate guard who examines each farmer, I am not sure what we can do.
Most of us feel that the continued imposition of the 20 day rule is unnecessary especially since we could not really be further from the source of the (DEFRA cock-up) outbreak but no, they will not budge...."

2001 November (Westmorland Gazette)

"....Come on ministers, surprise me and tell us the way forward for British Agriculture.
You say you want a strong, vibrant agriculture, well you could have fooled me; so come on show me how wrong I have been.
You may remember I told you about the government taking powers to seize one's cattle and sheep with no right of appeal.

If that would not mean we were living in a police state, well you could have fooled me.

I also said that what Elliott Morley (minister) would be better doing, was adopting the test for foot-and-mouth disease perfected by Professor Fred Brown of the United States Research Centre at Plum Island....."

Six years on. And the same frustrations expressed. The same arrogant, jack-booted mentality that "knew best" in 2001 is still goose-stepping over the efforts and advice of those who want to help keep Britain farming. And what was written by the same farming commentator, six years ago in October 2001, on the subject of emergency ring vaccination, makes DEFRA's lack of progress seem even more unbelievable, incomprehensible, tyrannical.