The insidious cull
- economics pose the biggest danger to British herds
- July 2001
This Opinion was featured in the July 2001 issue of the Anglia Farmer and Contractor
With the foot-and-mouth outbreak coming under control, some are starting to focus on the future of the livestock industry.
And it's not a bright one. Foot-and-mouth will be seen as just another pothole on a poorly kept road.
With the worst of the outbreak almost certainly behind us the number of livestock identified by MAFF for slaughter has only recently past the three million mark.
Last year, however, 3.6 million head were simply lost to economic conditions. Since 1989, the UK livestock population has declined by 30 percent, an average of 1.8 million head a year.
This has gone largely unnoticed. But it's a far grimmer legacy for the industry than the foot-and-mouth outbreak. This silent cull has provided, of course, little out of the ordinary to be photographed or filmed and so has passed virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media.
But for those involved, the losses were every bit as traumatic. The foot-and-mouth victim at least has the solace of bad luck and publicsympathy; the victim of the silent cull is on his own to deal with the inference of inadequacy and personal failure.
Certainly, he can expect little from a government, which seems to have next to no interest in farming beyond minimizing costs to the Exchequer.
Elsewhere in Europe, the pretence of truly commercial agriculture has been largely abandoned in what are euphemistically called "less favored areas." Tourism rules.
Much of the British livestock population, however, grazes land either too wet or too hilly to accommodate anything else. It's country not blessed with sunny weather and squeezing out agriculture won't naturally turn the countryside into a tourist mecca.
This is something that's better understood by farmers than the government. And as the gulf between urban and rural welfare widens and resentment grows, resolving the situation becomes an increasingly daunting challenge.
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