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THEY USED TO BE FARMERS...

Donald Slater diversified his farm away from egg production after he was nearly wiped out by the UK salmonella scare in the 1980s.

Successive governments have encouraged farmers to expand their interests into farm shops, tea rooms, and ice cream parlours, so that they are not so reliant on... well - farming.

Slater spent £350,000 (around $500,000) of borrowed money, to create a Visitors' Centre at his farm, drawing 80,000 visitors in the year 2000.

That was before foot-and-mouth disease returned to the UK after an absence of 34 years.

Thanks to foot-and-mouth, Donald Slater is now expecting his losses to top £100,000 (around $150,000) in the next few weeks.

The llamas, sheep and goats at his centre are free of the disease - so far; but the public cannot pay him entrance fees - because of government restrictions in response to the disease. No visitors means no income. But he still has to pay back his loan.

Is Intensive Farming The Culprit?

Salmonella... CJD... foot-and-mouth... Is there a pattern here? Are the benefits of intensive farming coming back to haunt us?

Who Shall We Blame?

Who are to blame - farmers, government or consumers?

If someone has to carry the can, it has to be us, the consumers. After all, the government are striving to do what the voters want, so they can be elected next time.

And what consumers want is, CHEAP FOOD. Especially in the UK where we are known by our Continental neighbours as being prepared to eat just about ANY old rubbish.

Thirty years ago the average UK family spent 50% of income on food - today it's around 15%.

As for the farmers being to blame - they are just going where the money is, which is their job. The European Union (EU) - as with national governments before them - tries to play God, and distorts markets by applying subsidies for the farmers to chase. So they do. You really can't blame the farmers.

They have had a very tough time of it for years. They can work hard all year only to see the value of their produce drop; so they end up earning £10,000 or less a year - or even making a loss.

Otherwise they wouldn't be diversifying into tea rooms.

So the buck rests with the consumer - us. It is because of our love of low food prices that intensive farming has developed and been used so much.

And I cannot see consumer pressure changing soon.

Organic Salvation?
Of course, the organic movement will receive a boost because of these recent crises. And that is for the good. But let's be realistic - it will be perverted as producers chase the money. Not everyone producing organic food will be a paid up member of Greenpeace.

You can't have confidence in food production in any country that can embrace a variety of tomato called 'Moneymaker' - named because its strong skins didn't burst so easily on the way to market. The downside of the variety? - completely tasteless!!! Many young people must think that tomatoes have always been tasteless.

If you look hard, you can now buy "Tomatoes - chosen for taste" at the supermarket. The implied question: "What the heck else would consumers choose them for?!"

Foot-and-Mouth

Now foot-and-mouth has become a big election issue in the UK. Prime Minister Tony Blair has had to juggle around his planned general election date to try to avoid losing votes in the middle of a crisis.

Why bother? Following his last landslide victory, no-one sees much chance of a swing in voter sentiments anyway.

A conservative government wouldn't have behaved any differently in such
a crisis.

Most people are aghast at the number of animals being slaughtered to avoid spread of the disease. But let's put that in context: the 70,000 animals a week being killed for this purpose compares with 550,000 a week regularly slaughtered to feed our appetite for meat.

The UK government - and the farmers - are desperate to maintain their 'foot-and-mouth free' status - else very valuable export markets will be lost. Hence the avoidance of vaccination so far, which has the downside of preventing foot-and-mouth-free animals being identified through testing. Vaccinated animals show positive results in these tests. So unscrupulous traders could easily pass off infected animals as healthy animals which have been vaccinated.

Surely a better test procedure could be developed? Until it is, vaccination remains an unpalatable option for countries with a valuable 'foot-and-mouth-free' status.

But vaccination may have to be introduced to help control future outbreaks. This was also agreed by officials in the US and Canada. They feel it may be the only way to deal with the growing pace of movement by animals and humans. This spreads the disease very easily - through the air, on clothing, and on car tyres, for example.

As for the view that "foot-and-mouth to animals is like a cold to humans" - popularized by the UK press; this was scorned by a MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food) official I spoke to yesterday. The disease consists of large vesicles - blisters - around the mouth and hooves. These burst and can easily become infected - by walking in mud, for example. Then you have the chance of animals with blood poisoning walking into the food chain.

EU To Blame Again?
It's easy to blame the EU for many things - but then they do a lot of stupid things, as do all bureaucracies. (Excuse my prejudices surfacing...) In this instance, the regulations the EU imposed on abattoirs encouraged the rationalization of animal slaughter in the UK; which reduced the number of abattoirs. This meant that animals had to travel much larger distances to be slaughtered - a major factor in the rapid spread of the disease.

The UK government is now encouraging slaughter more locally.

Local Slaughter A Help?
Maybe for foot-and-mouth - but it's not necessarily the answer for disease-free meat.

Local slaughter is implicated in a cluster of cases of VCJD (Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease) - the human form of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.... Are you keeping up with this?!) In this disease, a type of protein called a 'prion' turns the brain of its victims to spongy matter.

Scientists love clusters of disease - they can then look for common factors, and identify causes.

The five people in the village of Queniborough, Leicester in central England who developed VCJD tended to buy their meat at certain local butchers. These butchers slaughtered their own animals, or used small abattoirs to do so, using an old-fashioned method of slaughter. Basically (don't read this bit if you're squeamish) this consisted of ramming a rod through the brain of the animal to squash the spinal cord.

This method has since been banned, since it allows bits of brain to contaminate other tissues.

The butchers also cut up brains - for sale - then, reasonably at the time, used the same knives for cutting other parts of the animal. This allowed cross-contamination.

The conclusions? The cluster strongly indicates the connection between VCJD and diet.

Big deal? Well yes - it is the first step towards proof of that connection, rather than guessing at it. Furthermore, contamination via blood transfusion, vaccines, and occupational exposure are now officially doubtful, at least in this case.

Return To Rural Small Scale Production?
"Phase out intensive farming" is an over-simplified answer to the question of producing better food. Yes, some intensive farming methods are dangerous and can be harmful. We elect governments to regulate the methods used.

There is certainly a strong case for removing subsidies from farming. This is one move which would present consumers with a more accurate measure of the cost of producing food. This would disadvantage large landowners, of course - a disproportionate number of whom just happen to sit in the UK Houses of Parliament.

But compelling small-scale production would not, by itself, help to avoid foot-and-mouth, or CJD. It would just increase our imports from other areas in the world where large scale production was retained. So it would damage our economy for no benefit.

Foot-and-mouth has cost the UK billions of pounds. Quite apart from the losses to farmers themselves, there are, for example, the redundancies and bankruptcies within farming support industries, and the huge losses to other businesses from a reduction in tourism.

Rather than subsidizing farmers, Governments should aim to make sure that the true costs of intensive farming methods - including costs of any necessary government action, medical treatment, and environmental damage - are reflected in the cost of the food produced. The pollution of rivers and seas by chemical run-off, springs to mind - a shocking degradation of the environment.

Then a truer indication of the real cost of food production would be there for all to see.

The Answer To The Meat Issue
Buying 'high quality' meat is not an answer; the meat from the butchers in the VCJD cluster village was high quality, locally produced, expensive meat. It was not 'value beef cutlets', or reclaimed tiny bits of meat stripped off boiled up animals' intestines and moulded to be sold in burger bars.

What can you do?
Firstly, don't wait for farming methods to be improved. You'll wait a long time. Take action!

As with all aspects of natural healthcare, you have to use your
common sense.

Oh, by the way, the cluster has also enabled a better estimate of the time taken to develop VCJD; it's thought that 10-16 years passed between the consumption of contaminated meat and the onset of the disease.

VCJD hasn't peaked yet. In the UK, 95 cases are confirmed. Hundreds to thousands of cases will occur in time. In France, the first 3 cases have been confirmed.

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