I never thought it possible that the horizon could be filled with the fire of burning animals.
The recent death former president of the National Farmers Union (NFU) Sir Ben Gill, who died aged just 64, triggered a lot of surprisingly bitter debate about the tenure of a man who will forever associated with some of the most turbulent and difficult times in modern farming. Sir Ben can count himself almost singularly unlucky that both Mad Cow disease, which resulted in an export ban on a British beef that lasted almost 15 years, and the foot and mouth crisis both occurred on his watch. In short, he had to take some tough decisions at a time when the Labour government knew next to nothing about rural issues; in the interests of balance, the Conservatives are scarcely better as the rural wing actually represents the Barbour jacket types more than actual farmers, which is why you see a lot of UKIP posters around here. It was therefore no exaggeration to say that he became the most powerful man in Britain, after the prime minister, during the time of the foot and mouth crisis in 2001.
On the face of it, Mad Cow disease and foot and mouth (a virus which can be passed to humans) bear little in common. One is naturally occurring, usually through poor animal husbandry - in this case the under-heating of pigswill - while the other resulted from poorly treated animal-based protein being introduced back into the food chain. It was very much the result of grievous human error after some hefty lobbying by the feed industry lowered the safety standards for protein recycling in the late 1980s. What both crises illustrated, however, is that the notion of farming as a seamless industrial enterprise that could be managed in much the same way as car manufacturing turned out to be acomplete fallacy.
It is difficult to remember quite how grim agri-business was in the 1970s and 1980's. A deliberate policy of centralising animal slaughter and distribution networks meant many local slaughter houses closed.The one in our area was next to the riding school, which was a bit hairy as the horses would sometimes bolt if they got a whiff of dead meat. That too was eventually closed down which meant that animals had to be transport at least 20 miles to be killed. The upshot was that more animals were having to go longer distances, with hauliers being the only real beneficiaries; hauliers are the real aristocracy in country areas as they get paid for transporting animals no matter how bad the prices are at market. Therefore, with the stage set, the onset of foot and mouth in 2001 was far worse than any previous outbreak as animal transport played a much bigger role in spreading the disease in the initial phases.
Which brings us into whether the policy of culling 10 million otherwise healthy animals was justified. The rationale for the cull, which the NFU supported, was based on statistical research carried out by hitherto unknown academics at Imperial College called Roy Anderson and Neil Ferguson. It was controversial at the time as neither had any real expertise in the specific field of animal disease. Private Eye published a special report in 2002 that rubbished most of the computer modelling that Imperial College used, drawing the conclusion that it was primarily used because it predicted an end to foot and mouth that coincided with the date that Tony Blair had chosen that year's delayed general election. The end result was that the cull was probably 10 times larger than should ever have been the case.
Let's not understate the damage this caused to the rural economy. There are few people in the Devon countryside that didn't know someone who was traumatised by the experience. Not only did it destroy livelihoods and end generations of farming in some areas, it also caused bitter divisions between the traditional big landed farming interests, who benefited the most from subsequent compensation payments, and the small-scale family businesses that are still apparent, and the question of whether farmers' leadership failed comprehensively is still open to debate.
