The last word on Foot-in-Mouth Disease
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Polly Toynbee, the Guardian Has the country ground to a halt, lights out, closed for business, a nation in deadly quarantine? Watching the nightly news, that is what townies and the world outside think, as reporters stand by burning pyres, intoning purple prose that would better suit the floods, fever and famine found aplenty among humans elsewhere. Mad reporter disease has seized the BBC as they stand in the few crisis areas wringing their hands in the flickering flames, stricken with a verbal dose of the Fergal Keanes. How bad is it out there? For the farmers waiting for slaughter or left with bloated dead cows for days before incineration, it is a disgusting disaster to live near. But this is not the plague. People are not dead. (The 79-year-old Devon farmer who drank near-lethal disinfectant out of fear his cattle might catch it, is in a stable condition. His family says he's been depressed since Christmas.) Is the countryside paralysed? Not really. No schools are closed, no country |
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pubs shut, mail and milk is delivered everywhere. Smoke is not billowing from coast to coast. Pyres are hard to find, even in Cumbria where thetourist board and county council are outraged at the impression given that it is closed for business: it is not. Maff says fell-walking continues so long as rules are obeyed, lakes are open: travel from Carlisle to Keswick and you pass no smoke. Parts of south Dumfries, north Cumbria and a bit of Devon are badly affected, but elsewhere, Maff insists, life goes on, apart from small patches around an]outbreak. Only 1% of the nation's livestock is affected - still minor compared with the same stage in the 1967 outbreak: 12 new cases a day now, 77 then. As for the reported £9bn cost of this - it is the kind of nonsense figure thrown up in every crisis. All proportion and perspective has been lost. Everyone sympathises with farmers who lose precious blood-lines and have to start again in the midst of an agricultural recession. But they get full compensation. The tragedy is not on the scale of the 6,000 steel workers or the swathes of textile and car workers who have lost their livelihoods in the past year, for much the same reasons as the agricultural depression - high sterling and failing to join |
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the euro. Those were one-day news stories, with no camera- grabbing fires to mark the moment. Unpaid mortgages and the silent drop from decent pay to a minimum wage is not telegenic. The latest annual agricultural figures have just been posted on the Maff website. They make interesting reading. Agriculture now accounts for just 0.8% of GDP. The total workforce is 2% and falling. As farmers cut costs, they shed 11% of paid farm workers last year, but in England and Wales land values have shot up 10.7% per hectare. In real terms, assets rose, while debts fell. Since 1995 farming has been in sharp recession - but that came after a rapid boom: it averages out at a 40% increase since 1990, not too bad. Meanwhile, the total subsidy farmers received last year was £3.1bn - which is more than all subsidy for all other industries put together. Averages are unfair and there are some very poor struggling farmers, just as there are poor corner shopkeepers alongside rich supermarkets: while life is tough for marginal tenant farmers, the rich owner- farmers - who get most of the subsidy - saw their capital wealth grow hugely, again. |
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Turn to the National Farmers Union website and there is today's impassioned plea from their leader: "the prime minister is urged to give a glimmer of hope through the gloom" in this "soul-devouring crisis" where many are "suffering the torture of worrying where the disease will strike next". "Dark days are stretching ahead of farmers and many are at their wits end, not knowing how they are going to make ends meet." They demand more from the government: what is euphemistically called an "adjustment" to the sheep annual premium, "a recovery package would at least to give farmers hope to carry on", begging for a "scheme to help farmers retire". Retire? What of the other one third of pensioners who retire with no savings? Down on the farm they live by other rules, in which ordinary state benefits levels are not enough Why, on top of compensation, do they expect more than anyone else? Why - even odder - does the government keep on doling it out? Since 1997 Labour has shelled out £1.2bn on top of the common agricultural policy (CAP), with another £1.6bn promised from last October. If ever there was a prime example of the Tory view that subsidies corrupt and distort, it is in farming. Farmers do not insure against disasters like any other business |
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because the state always compensates them for bad luck or bad farming. Maff itself admits there is considerable incentive to fraud in the subsidies - and it happens. CAP pays out for production, needed or not, so most goes to the big barley barons. But 20% could be diverted to environmental purposes instead - guarding hedgerows, coppices, forests and heathland, creating field margins for wild flowers, building dry stone walls and a countryside fit for townie tourists. Poor farmers should get more subsidy to do this work. But, frightened of the big boys, Labour only dares divert 2.5% away from unwanted production into environmental subsidies, though even France diverts its full 20% from production. Perhaps it is because farmers own three quarters of Britain's land mass that they mesmerise the nation. Whether it is the Countryside Alliance on the hoof, fuel protesters in tractors, new demands for extra compensation, or slow-hand claps for the chief vet, they lack any idea of how they look to the rest of the nation. Nightly watching them weep over animals destined to be eaten, cuddling lambs reared for mint sauce is bizarre. William Hague says: "The rural way of life is under threat from urban values, Islington pressure groups and a metropolitan elite who know nothing |
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of the countryside." Well, the view from Lambeth (in my case) is that we are learning a great deal more about the countryside than we did. The louder they shout for more, the closer we examine what they get already - and how they farm.On average country-dwellers are healthier, happier, safer, better educated and richer than urban-dwellers. More than half British people wish they lived in the country, but can't afford to join this genuine elite. Disappearing post offices and shops, or outbreaks of animal disease are sad - but on the scale of human pain or national emergency, rural discomfort is a small tear in the chintz of the nation's social fabric. As the Guardian's campaign on bare, ruined public services shows, everywhere there is a desperate need to repair the damage of a 20-year stand-still. Uneducated youth, badly cared for old age, 2,000 wasteland urban estates, transport in meltdown, prisons with reoffending designed in, squalid urban space and low national ambition and expectation. But dead cows on pyres grip |
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