Foot and Mouth: the debate rages
To vaccinate? …
The council estate at Bevendean, Brighton, lies in the bottom of a steep-sided Downland valley, surrounded, on the slopes above, by the bare fields of Upper Bevendean Farm.
As some of the heaviest rains for a thousand years poured and poured last October, the autumn- ploughed, sodden valley sides shed their soil in a nightmare sludge, flooding and burying the ground floors of all homes below up to 4 feet deep in mud.
5 months later many of these homes are still empty. No financial liability hit the farmer. No loss of tenancy.
This February, as the foot and mouth outbreak spread, Brighton Council’s Country-side Rangers, paid for by these same residents scurried around the valleyside footpaths posting notices banning them from further access across that farm. And being kind folk (and not wanting to risk £50 fines), they obey. For surely the farmer’s business is at risk?
Such is the tremendous cultural weight that farmers and landowners still possess. They have their own government ministry. Their trade association, the Nationa1 Farmers Union has the ear of the Prime Minister.
This weight has been used to push through a massive, militarised, campaign of livestock slaughter which has denuded some of our most hard-pressed farming districts of livestock lovingly built up over decades, and even centuries. Even rare breeds have not been spared.
For the NFU and MAFF mandarins assumed, as always, that this was their countryside, to do with as they pleased.
The shire County Councils, the RSPB, the National Trust and the Wildlife Trusts – huge land-owners themselves – are desperate not to offend the rural ruling class.
The Environment Agency, the statutory body set up to protect the environment, banned all countryside visits by its staff!
The government let a simple measure to ban the old rural ruling class cruelty of fox hunting fail in the House of Lords, but two lads caught with air rifles in a Swindon Country Park were fined £500 each for breaking the foot and mouth regulations!
The laid-off workers of Cumbria and the besieged livestock farmers, had to take the matter into their own hands and demonstrate to B1air and Nick Brown that they were not just bit-players in MAFF’s cold-hearted power-play.
Foot and mouth is a disease which has disproportionately affected the weakest, the most hard pressed of Britain’s farm businesses. It is the sheep and beef producing westerly uplands, where farmers are often living at income support levels on marginal holdings entirely dependent on subsidies, that are most threatened.
Yet whilst the output-related subsidy system pushes these farmers to damage moorland and mountain ecosystems by overgrazing, it still fails to provide them with a decent living. And now it imposes indiscriminate mass slaughter on their flocks and herds.
Foot and mouth is an economic disease. It is not the symptoms of the disease which cause such grief. This is not BSE, cattle plague, or swine fever. This is an illness directly comparable to flu.
The animals suffer. They lose condition. They go off their food. Sometimes the young and weak die. But most recover. Animal marketing has only to be postponed for some weeks.
It is the archaic methods of dealing with the disease, not the disease itself which bring the horrors of mass slaughter, incineration and burial, rural siege and personal despair.
The cure is far worse. Many farming systems, from the Kenyan Masai to the Duke of Westminster’s Cheshire estate, have proven that common sense disinfection and hygiene can cure this disease in a matter of weeks.
Masai herdsmen routinely infect their cattle to raise their immune levels. The Duke of Westminster (who won exemption from the mass slaughter policy in the 1923 outbreak) was showing and selling stock which had suffered foot and mouth at the Royal Show the following year.
This outbreak is not a result of intensive systems. It is not, by and large, the rich agribusinesses which are suffering. But it is the growth of mass motorway livestock trading which has spread the disease so widely, and it is the needs of international exporters which have dictated the mass slaughter policy.
There is no proof that walkers have presently spread the disease. In terms of movement restrictions, it would be more rational to close the motorway system than the pedestrian right of way.
The major agricultural county of Cambridgeshire has resisted closing its footpath system, except where paths cross pasture land.
It was wealthy and influential breeders who dictated the slaughter policy 130 years ago. And it is the needs of the export trade which dictate its continuance today. Yet our export trade does not even reach the level of imports of the same meat products; total exports of lamb for example only equal 82 % of their imports.
No serious scientific assessment of the 1oss of productivity caused by the disease has been done for 130 years. The appalling cure has come to be equated with the disease itself. It is a myth that the biological features of the disease have dictated its management. On the contrary, it is the atavistic orthodoxy of ‘the NFU and MAFF that have brought about this catastrophe.
The sheer scale of the farming disaster has forced an increasingly strident ruling class reassessment of the social, economic & cultural role of agriculture.
The Independent, the Observer and the Guardian all carry heavy criticism not just of the slaughter policy, but of agribusiness and MAFF, in general. Sometimes, sotto voce, the Telegraph joins in. Even some of the mainstream farming press (like the Farmers Guardian) sympathetically trail critiques of dominant ideas within the farming sector.
Yet much of the reassessment by people like Abigail Woods is confused, insensitive and even vicious. It ranges from calls to comprehensively abandon agriculture, to celebrating the loss of farm jobs, to calls for massive conversion to organic production and for industry "restructuring" – a euphemism for further business concentration, job losses and the destruction of small farms.
Everywhere, on all sides, the issues of tenure, of ownership, are ignored. Farmers are treated as though their interests are always the same. No distinction is made between a sheep farmer on 100 acres of damp valley land in Wales, and a Jaguar-driving barley baron from Norfolk on his 1000 acres who runs this desert on a workforce that couldn’t have run 200 acres 100 years ago.
We need a real debate on the future agriculture – not Blair’s cosmetic version
We need more people working the land, not less, both for the sake of people and of the landscape itself. The option of involvement in food production corresponds to a basic need for integration with natural processes in us all.
It is no surprise that as the option of paid work in farming has been destroyed gardening and countryside activities have grown to outweigh all other leisure pursuits. People don’t want long hours of back-breaking work at poverty wages but they do want to work the land.
One of the worst features of capitalism, commented on by the earliest socialists, is the ruthless alienation from nature and natural processes which its concentrated destructive productive processes brought.
A socialist society without the option of land-based work is inconceivable.
The landscape desperately needs more labour. Our richest landscapes and ecosystems were created by human labour and management systems.
Now they have been replaced with giant machines needing huge, uniform spaces to operate, whose fabrication contains the alienated labour of thousands of line workers, quarrymen, technicians and drivers.
Livestock farming and pastoral systems are essential even above the obvious reasons of meat, hide and wool production. Many cultural landscapes are the direct product of pastoral systems. Hedgerows, moors, downs, heaths and meadows are all the product of grazing systems. Without grazing many of our richest ecosystems would simply disappear.
The price of abandoning livestock farming will be the extinction not just of many species, but of whole communities of species.
Alternative systems, such as organic farming, are no solution without dealing with the social relations of production. Converts to organic farming include huge arable producers, who have already ruthlessly destroyed their farm landscapes, but wish to escape huge agrochemical bills.
Organic farming, with greater direct labour inputs, often brings poverty wages which make conventional agribusiness seem generous. Organic farming brings its own sources of pollution, which brings new dangers to wildlife. Organic systems can be as land hungry, as conventional systems.
Small scale farming is no solution. The conditions of life on the ‘family farm’ are amongst the most backward of any sector, with deep isolation, patriarchal industrial relations, poor living conditions, and poverty wages. Hereditary farming is no more to be celebrated than hereditary monarchy or hereditary shelf stacking.
Farming should be subsidised only where it makes a social contribution. Low intensity grazing or coppice woodland management, for instance, make vital landscape and wildlife contributions in addition to their productivity.
At present the richest 21% of farmers attract 80% of subsidy. Capitalist subsidy furthers environmental degradation and the consolidation of agribusiness
The neo-liberal world trade system wrecks both Third World peasant economies and the British countryside. Local, protected production, for local markets must be the basis of sustainable food production.
The countryside belongs to everyone. Farmers contribute only 1% of output but control 80% of the area of Britain. Food production is very much a minority element in the rural economy and farming is just one part now of a long food production process.
Farm machinery workers, seedsmen, packers, processors, fertiliser manufacturers, drivers, retailers, abattoir workers are all part of the process though their work gives them no access to the land.
And access to nature must be at the centre of all dreams of socialist self-fulfilment.
So how do we fight our way out of this crisis?
The barbaric cull must be stopped and the vaccination option implemented. The logic of mass livestock slaughter is a horrific overkill to reach globally insignificant economic and political ends.
Lift the rural siege, even if this means the naturalisation of foot and mouth. MAFF/NFU have done to public access what the Countryside Alliance just dream of – they have shut us up in our ‘concrete jungles’.
Guarantee all farm income at the level of the average wage. We must end the bleed of farming jobs, end the hopelessness of small and marginal farmers. We must tax and expropriate the rich to pay for this.
Offer workers the option of socialisation of failing rural businesses with guaranteed jobs and income.
Rural workers should not pay for the MAFF/NFU generated catastrophe.
Create a whole new animal welfare regime
Ban intensive systems and long distance livestock transport
Turn the foot and mouth crisis into a crisis for the MAFF/NFU system
Sussex genetiX action showed the way when its demonstrations and other actions forced a local farmer to abandon GM trials for fear of foot and mouth contamination. This prompted a national farmers’ campaign to abandon GM trials for the duration of the outbreak.
Demand the socialisation of the land and all food production under democratic control of workers and all countryside users
Supermarket workers share the poverty wages of the farming industry. Both have an interest in ending the productivist regime of agribusiness, the hamster wheel of just-in-time production and its consumerist public face.
Only when the need for healthy food production is balanced democratically with the need for land based work, biodiversity, conservation and multiple recreational uses will we see an open harmonious and egalitarian countryside.
It is only 15 years since Frank Dobson raised the demand for socialisation of the land. Lloyd George campaigned for it all his political career. The farm workers union bore this policy on its masthead.
Now it is up to a new generation of activists to realise our vision for a socially owned, democratic countryside – The land is ours!