COVER -> DAY ONE
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Far away, in the North of England, a single farmer, in an attempt to cut his costs to the bone, fed improperly cooked swill to his pigs. In spite of signs that they had become infected with the foot and mouth virus, they were driven the length of the country, to Essex, to an abattoir specialising in the slaughter of worn out old sows to provide the raw material for German sausages.
By the time that this tale of meanness -- it hardly merits the term "greed" -- emerged, the pigs had passed on the virus to other animals, particularly to sheep which were being shipped, legally and illegally, all over Britain and across the sea to Ulster and Eire.
Tracing the disease has involved following the movements of herds, flocks, trucks and individual animals and it has naturally shown that farmers are no different from the rest of us.
There are bad apples in the barrel and these affect the good majority of their fellows who are now watching their animals being slaughtered on their own land in broad daylight.
A farmer who has built up his herd for almost a century plays Verdi full blast in an attempt to shut out the gunfire prior to the carcasses being set alight.
Humanity requires that we empathise with individual tragedy and that we press for fair compensation. Just as an insurance claim after a robbery cannot make good the loss of family memorabilia, compensation cannot totally make good the loss but the knowledge that society has acted fairly might be of some comfort to sufferers.
Reason equally requires that instances of individual and community tragedy are not used to perpetuate myths and illusions. This is difficult because the spread of a disease is a perfect media story: it is dramatic; it has a multitude of human interest angles; it is full of surprises; and it produces statistics.
The most central of these is the total disjuncture between contented cattle and cuddly lambs in the field and the meat on your plate.
People are outraged by the slaughter of these diseased beasts as if they would all otherwise die of old age. Even dairy cattle and sheep reared for wool rarely die a natural death. We are also apt to rank animals in a hierarchy when it comes to slaughter, with dolphins and seals near the top, sheep and cows in the middle and chickens at the bottom.
We are irrationally outraged by the treatment of those at the top, prefer those in the middle to be slaughtered away from our senses, behind closed doors and pay very little attention to the factory farming of poultry.
We are also apt to wax sentimental about the sheep in the field, the cows in the corn, forgetting that they are the soft-focused front for massive, hard-nosed agri-business.It is important in this context to remember that although foot and mouth disease causes severe, temporary, discomfort to animals, most of them recover from it; the only problem is a slow down in the fattening process and a reduction in milk yield. To that extent one herd of animals is being slaughtered in order to protect the productivity of another. The margins are fiercely competitive.
These multi-national, food processing cartels are in turn driven by supermarkets which have to square the demands of shareholders for dividends and consumers for cheap food.This, of course, is an illusion. In addition to the use of taxation for agricultural subsidies, there are the steady health costs of food contamination and the extraordinary costs of outbreaks such as this and the even more costly mad cow disease.
At this point we are back with the farmer at the beginning of this tragic story. If we should have learned anything from mad cow disease it is that animal material should not be fed to herbivores but that is exactly what that farmer did. It was his misfortune and ours that the swill he used contained contaminated meat but if there were any sense in these matters it would have contained no meat at all.
Prime Minister Blair has called for a searching debate on these issues once the immediate crisis is over but the auspices are not good.
When he said that farmers were being arm-locked by the supermarket chains there was outrage. The argument was that if the price of food in the shops was raised (with a balancing reduction in the use of taxation for agriculture) basic foods would be beyond the reach of the poor. To which the obvious reply is that if the poor cannot afford wholesome food at a real price then they are not being paid enough in wages and/or welfare benefits.
At a more fundamental level, however, there is the whole question of the way in which we finance and support food production, often wasting vast amounts of public money on over-production. A very rich man a mile from here receives an annual grant for planting a crop he will never harvest.
Just as the production of basic industrial goods has shifted from the most developed to less developed economies there is a strong argument for allowing a much freer, much less subsidised food production system. This would enable predominantly agricultural countries to export their goods to us at a reasonable price without the unpleasant by-products of intensive, industrial agriculture. As we wait for the compensation claims to kick in we might also ask why agriculture is uniquely not responsible for insuring itself against loss.
In the meantime, a number of predictable events have occurred. As a sadly inevitable consequence of public sector support for agriculture, some farmers have been infecting their own beasts in order to obtain compensation. Animals have been moved illegally, making a nonsense of attempts to isolate the virus.
Far right enemies of the Government who resent that it ever won an election are threatening to disobey orders for unaffected herds in affected areas to be slaughtered.
Other industries, such as tourism, affected by the outbreak, are already filing their claims. That Northern farmer, through one means or another, will cost the country an estimated 12 billion US dollars. The only mercy is that the figure comprises everybody's first bid for Government compensation.
One final thought, not entirely unrelated. I am writing this on the day when the collective conscience of Britain is turned, through a massive public relations and fund raising enterprise, to consider the plight of people in the poorest countries in the world. This slaughter of some 300,000 animals has received massively more press coverage than was ever accorded to the genocide in Rwanda and there are many who will stand in the driving rain to protest against the transportation of veal calves in crates who would not turn out on a sunny afternoon to protest at the treatment of refugees, exiles and immigrants. Being deeply concerned for the welfare of animals is no substitute for caring for human beings.
