The Observer
How a rural idyll turned into a hotbed of disease
The foot and mouth disaster throws the whole of Britain's livestock farming practices into question
http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,442745,00.html
Anthony Browne and Paul Harris
Sunday February 25, 2001

It was just after 11am yesterday when the heavy oak door of a grey central London building swung open to let three grim-faced figures scuttle inside. The men from the ministry had arrived, bringing news from the frontline of the battle against foot and mouth disease.

In a sparsely furnished room on the eighth floor of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food headquarters, they offered their prognosis.

It was bad. Hundreds of farms remained sealed off to the outside world; livestock markets would stay shut for at least a week and the slaughter of animals had begun on eight farms. But Jim Scudamore, the chief veterinary surgeon, Agriculture Secretary Nick Brown and Baroness Hayman, a junior Minister, had one snippet of good news: no fresh outbreaks of the disease had been reported.

They spoke as the grim preparations continued at Ronald and Bobby Waugh's Burnside Farm in Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland to slaughter their pigs. It was here the disease is thought to have first emerged. In silence, locals watched as lorries carrying kindling and coal trundled through the rusty gates. In a nearby field, JCB diggers gouged huge holes in the earth.

They were digging graves. In the farm's holding sheds vets had used specially-adapted guns to shoot the animals in the head before their bodies were taken to the pits for burning. The fires will be lit today.

The pigs' deaths are no more horrific that their lives, according to reports of conditions at Burnside Farm. Vets declared it was the perfect breeding ground for the disease. Rotting pig carcasses had been left with live pigs. Pieces of raw meat were left lying about the farm. The sows gave birth among other pigs, and grown pigs were eating piglets.

It took only days for the microscopic virus to bring the countryside to a halt. The transport of all livestock and meat have been banned and a dozen farms put in quarantine. Hunting has been stopped, horse racing banned, cattle markets closed.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has shut all its reserves, and zoos including Whipsnade have closed their gates. Even the Army has been brought to a halt, suspending military exercises on rural land. Supermarkets now fear that with food supplies disrupted, panic buying will set in.

The scale of the clampdown has nothing to do with the severity of the disease - it is almost entirely harmless to humans, and although it can be fatal to cloven-hooved animals, including pigs, goats and cattle, it usually causes blistering around the foot and mouth before the animal recovers. The reason for the alarm is the devastation the disease can cause to the farming industry and the economy. Animals suffering from foot and mouth lose their appetite, and meat production falls sharply. It is so infectious the entire national herd could succumb within days.

The government believes the measures taken have contained the disease, but the long-term impact is already becoming clear. The crisis has yet again exposed the appalling conditions of animals on some farms, and brought to public attention the modern farming practices that have brought us cheap food... and an endless round of health scares from BSE to swine fever to E coli and salmonella.

The outbreak has already exposed the frighteningly lax inspections of farms and the meat trade, and the consequences of long distance transport of food. Even though foot and mouth presents no threat to human health, it will add further momentum to demands for more naturally produced foods.

That squalid conditions existed at Heddon-on-the-Wall was widely known. Locals often complained about it. Last year Hillside Animal Sanctuary in Norwich sent a team to inspect it. Prevented from getting in, they saw enough from the gate to call in the RSPCA.

Acting on their advice, trading standards inspectors who visited the farm with MAFF officials on 22 December are thought to have wanted to prosecute. But MAFF officials simply told the Waughs to pull their socks up. A month later a further inspection also failed to spark action. The inspection last week by a vet revealed that the pigs were clearly suffering from foot and mouth, and had been for some time.

The farmers said they had not noticed: 'I honestly hadn't seen anything wrong with any of my pigs in the last few weeks,' said Robert Waugh.

But while it was incubating on his farm, the disease spread to Cheal Meats Abattoir in Essex, where the Northumberland pigs had been sent for slaughter. It has now spread to at least one other farm in Northumberland, and three sites near the abattoir. Dozens of farms are being investigated and hundreds of animals slaughtered and burned.

Animals are routinely sent from one end of the country to the other for slaughter, the result of a decline in the number of abattoirs. Almost two-thirds of abattoirs have closed in the last 10 years - down from 1000 t0 340 - because of increased costs of inspection after the BSE crisis.

Ewan Cameron, chairman of the Countryside Agency, said every market town should have an abattoir, a call taken up by Tories and Liberal Democrats. James Pavitt of the National Association of Farmers Markets said: 'It shows the need for more local abattoirs and less transportation, and the promotion of local food.'

The trade in meat is global, and inspection can be lax. Pork and beef is imported from countries such as Uruguay, Brazil, Zimbabwe and South Africa, all of which have had foot and mouth outbreaks in the past year. Other meat has been imported from Japan and Thailand which had serious outbreaks of the strain that is now infecting Britain.

When the meat arrives in Britain it is rarely inspected, and certainly not for foot and mouth disease. Harriett Kimbell, a director of the Consumers Association and adviser to the Government on BSE, said: 'This is an accident that has been waiting to happen. Anything could be coming in.'

Pressure to produce cheap and plentiful meat can lead to livestock being kept in conditions that those outside farming consider horrendous. The Heddon-on-the-Wall farm may have been notorious in its area, but most pigs are kept in poor conditions. Almost all bacon and sausages sold in Britain come from industrially produced pigs, who spend their lives cramped in dimly-lit sheds. They rarely have straw as bedding, and are kept on floors that are either concrete, or slatted so that their manure can drop out. The pigs get so distressed they start biting each other's tails, which are now routinely docked to prevent this.

Chickens are often kept in even worse condition than pigs. Up to 80,000 hens are kept cramped in dark barns, starved of fresh air and light. They are bred to grow so fast that they often have splayed legs, unable to support their unnaturally swollen bodies, and many suffer heart failure. To stop them pecking each other, their beaks are clipped, and they are fed antibiotics to stop disease spreading. The use of antibiotics in agriculture has risen 15-fold in 30 years, and now more antibiotics are used on farm animals than on people.

Selectively-bred dairy cows now produce 50 litres of milk a day, 10 times what a calf needs. Although sheep are generally reared traditionally on hillsides, they are transported long distances in large numbers. Live export of animals - the subject of vigorous campaigning a few years ago - has doubled since the protests. Evading bans by regular ferry companies, farmers now charter their own boats, increasing the number of animals exported from a low of 400,000 to more than a million.

The result of all this is that food poisoning in Britain has been growing rapidly. Since the early Eighties, reported cases of food poisoning have risen sevenfold to more than 100,000 a year. Peter Stevenson, political director of the lobby group Compassion in World Farming, said: 'We will continue to have these diseases so long as we have industrialised farming. Animals are kept in such cramped and squalid conditions it is hardly surprising they harbour disease, and once an animal is infected it spreads like wildfire.'

The outbreak will increase public concern by once again putting the spotlight on farming techniques. 'Every crisis adds up in the public consciousness, and they realise there are new ways of eating,' said Samantha Calvert of the Vegetarian Society. 'The current crisis will probably affect how people feel about food - it will lead to more vegetarians.'

Concerns about animal welfare have also led the Government to introduce other clampdowns on farming techniques. Veal crates were banned in 1990, and sow stalls for pigs were banned two years ago. Battery cages for chickens will be banned by 2012.

But the public are several steps ahead of the Government. Rather than wait for the farmer-friendly Minister of Agriculture Fisheries and Food to do anything, consumers are taking matters into their own hands. The comprehensive rejection of genetically modified foods shows just how passionate the British are on the issue, and the demand for more 'natural' foods is having far more widespread effects.

The desire to buy locally-produced food has seen an extraordinary renaissance in the last few years. It has fuelled an explosion in the number of farmers' markets, where food is sold by the farmer, a member of the family, or someone involved in production direct to the customer. Whereas there was just one farmers' market in 1997 there were 100 a year ago, and 300 at the beginning of this year. Last Christmas, more than half a million people got their festive food from farmers' markets.

Demand for organic food is growing by about 40 per cent a year, and 'eating organic' is becoming far more mainstream. When Planet Organic launched the concept of an organic supermarket in the UK in 1995 it was seen as of interest only to cranks. 'When I first had men in suits in here I thought they were spies - and some of them were,' said Renee Elliott, the founder. 'Now men in suits shop here all the time.'

In 1999 the supermarkets jumped on board. Tesco now has over 900 organic products, with an organic version of all its main lines, from pizza to wine. It also launched a range of 100 different 'Freedom Foods' of meat and animal products, recommended by the RSPCA for its humane production methods.

Free range eggs now account for about 20 per cent of all those sold in the UK, and they are now the only ones sold by Marks & Spencer. And nothing shows the power of the trend towards natural foods more strongly than the decision by McDonalds in the UK to ensure that at least 90 per cent of the eggs it uses are free range.

The move to more naturally produced food can only get a further boost as smoke from the piles of burning pig and cow carcasses afflicts the country.

'We are still clinging to an agricultural system invented 50 years ago. It is time to move on. I have no doubt that if we abandoned factory farming we would address a lot of these food issues,' predicted Stevenson.

Huge pyres were being built across the country last night as farmers, vets and Government officials started the slaughter of thousands of farm animals. Cattle were led out of sheds one by one and killed with a single rifle bolt to the head.

As JCB diggers dug huge holes in fields, men in white overalls gathered wooden railway sleepers, discarded fences and coal, before throwing thousands of carcasses on top for burning. Not since half a million animals were burned in 1967 has the country witnessed such scenes.

The mass slaughter is the latest desperate measure to curtail the foot and mouth disease that has paralysed the British countryside. As the killings started from Essex to Northumberland, in London the Agriculture Secretary Nick Brown declared he was cautiously optimistic that the outbreak had been contained, with no new infections reported in the last 24 hours.

The slaughter started at eight sites, and will last several days. Most of the animals are pigs, but on some farms sheep and cattle will also be killed. Their carcasses will be burnt to eradicate any chance of the virus surviving.

Burnside Farm in Northumberland, believed to be the source of the outbreak, looked more like a construction site yesterday; mechanical loaders carted railway sleepers across a field to erect the pyre for 300 sows and 200 young pigs, which were killed last night.

At a neighbouring farm, 25 cows were led away, presumably for slaughter. 'That's Jim Brown's cattle,' said two middle-aged men out for walk. 'Terrible what's happened to him.' One pointed to another two farms up the hill: 'They say the cattle up there will have to go as well.

Meanwhile, Ministry men in white overalls were rushing around preparing for the fires while police, fearing clouds of dense smoke, stood by to close the nearby A69 dual carriageway. Convoys of trucks arrived laden with more sleepers, discarded wooden fences and anything capable of burning.

At Headcorn in Kent, where a cattle herd is being killed as a precautionary measure, animals were yesterday being led one by one out of their sheds. A trained slaughterman then fired a single bolt into their skulls. After the animals slumped to the ground, bleeding from the wound in their heads, a vet made sure they were dead. Only when the entire herd is dead, which could take two days, will the fires be lit.

MAFF officials were cautiously optimistic that the outbreak is being contained. 'We would expect to receive further reports from farmers now if it had spread, and so far there are no more confirmed cases,' said Brown.

Brown urged people to avoid panic-buying of meat at supermarkets as rumours of a shortage swept the country. Shops around Britain reported that meat sales were not abnormally large.

The effect on the countryside, however, was already taking its toll. Many rural areas were quieter than usual with markets, hunts, horse racing events, country rambles, zoos and nature reserves all closed.

Judith Parry, 46, whose husband Rhys owns a sheep and cattle farm near Raglan in Wales, said: 'Most people are avoiding moving about and are just going to make do with what is in the freezer.'

Anglers and birdwatchers were told to avoid areas where there are livestock farms, while the Ramblers Association told members not to stroll in the countryside. 'Take the dogs for a walk on the beach,' a spokesman advised.

Supermarket giant Somerfield announced the suspension of a dozen roadshows for hundreds of farmers next week.

In Ireland Agriculture Minister Joe Walsh ordered the closure of all cattle markets along the republic's border with Northern Ireland to prevent the disease spreading south.

Concerns were raised this weekend about poor farming practices used at the Northumberland farm. Residents living nearby had reported the poor state of the farm's animals to an animal welfare charity but, despite local officials wanting to launch a prosecution, Ministry of Agriculture officials over-ruled them. Animal welfare campaigners believe that disease outbreaks are inevitable in an industry where pigs are kept in dark, cramped conditions that are often poorly ventilated. 'If we want to end the persistent disasters of BSE, swine fever and now foot and mouth we need to have a radical reform of the way we farm animals in this country,' said Peter Steven son, political director of Compassion in World Farming.

Critics also point out that diseases now spread much quicker because animals often have to travel hundreds of miles to be slaughtered because of the closure of small-scale local abbatoirs.

Britain's pig industry says its animal welfare conditions are strict and aimed at providing healthy animals. But some critics say much more needs to be done to help the welfare of the 14 million pigs slaughtered each year for the meat trade. Many of them spend all their lives in dark sheds, crowded together in their own excrement.

Once again British farming is in a state of shock. Once again consumers are in a state of bewilderment. Once again consumers are being asked to pay the price for a system of agriculture and food production which, time after time, has shown itself to be deeply flawed.

We have had, and continue to have, listeria, salmonella, BSE, E. coli, swine fever and infectious anaemia in farmed salmon. We now have foot-and-mouth for the first time since 1981. And yet the root cause of each of these disasters is the same: the policy that we must produce as much food as we can, as cheaply as we can.

So ingrained has the concept of cheap food become that it seems impossible now to eradicate it from the political process, institutional planning and the public mind. Yet no one seems to stop to count the true cost of 'cheap food'.

For a number of years the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has been following a covert policy of closing down 'red meat' abattoirs. The theory was that there were too many of them to be viable - and it was true that many of them were badly run.

Under the guise of implementing EU regulations, MAFF set about closing the smaller ones, and centralising the slaughter of animals in large units. The logic behind this had little to do with the EU - it would have been easy to bring the smaller abattoirs up to standard over a reasonable period - and much to do with economies of scale.

Never mind that animals would become more stressed because they would have to travel greater distances to be slaughtered. Never mind the greater chances of infectivity in the case of an outbreak of disease. The costs of slaughter would be reduced. Meat would be cheaper. The public would be appeased.

So, between 1985 and 2000, the number of abattoirs fell from 1,022 to 387. Over the same period, the average number of animals killed each week has risen from 13,313 per abattoir to 32,729. The consequences of this policy have been made evident by the course of the latest outbreak of foot-and-mouth. When the first case was identified, the focus of investigation fell on Cheale Meats in Little Warley, Essex. It has since been established that more than 600 farms, from as far away as Northumberland, Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland and Scotland, send their meat there.

Given the fact that the foot-and-mouth virus is so highly contagious and can be transmitted by living animals or in the carcases of dead ones, it is easyto see the potential for contamination. It may well turn out, of course, that the true source of the outbreak is traced to meat imported from another part of the world - all in the name of cheap food - and so we can pass the buck. But we have to accept the blame ourselves because we have institutionalised the whole notion of cheap food.

The original reasons behind the cheap food policy, conceived in the wake of World War II, may have been worthy, but the case for change is now overwhelming. The drive for cheap food has been behind every major food catastrophe of the past decade.

BSE was caused by the use of ground-up animals for feed because they were a cheap form of protein. Salmonella is endemic in chickens and their eggs because the broiler system delivers cheaper poultry products. E. coli is a by-product of intensive livestock practices. ISA in salmon is caused by the broiler system being applied to fish.

The consequences for the consumers, and the active part we play in the perpetuation of the policy, are equally dire - vCJD, food poisoning and obesity. We love cheap food. We binge on it. Diet-related diseases kill more people in the West than any other cause. We eat too much, diet too much, worry too much about our figures. Yet still we advocate keeping food as cheap as possible.

Instead of promising to perpetuate the discredited policies which have reaped such bitter harvests, the Government should embark on a policy of de-intensifying agriculture, scrapping false economies of scale and ensuring that a realistic price is charged for the results.

And we, as consumers, must accept our responsibilities and be prepared to pay for food that is produced up to a quality, not down to a price. Until we are, the outbreaks of foot and mouth, BSE, E. coli and their like will continue.