NICK BROWN
Minister of Agriculture GB

STATEMENT
The House of Commons
26th. APRIL 2001

& COMMENTS by Captain Bryn WAYT

Mr Speaker, with permission, I would like to make a statement on the foot and mouth outbreak.

As I did on eight occasions before the Easter break, and have done once already this week in a session with the Agriculture Committee, I wish to update the House on the latest position on the disease, set out the measures the Government is taking and give Hon and Rt Hon Members the opportunity to raise points with me. I also wish to inform the House about the outcome of the Agriculture Council in Luxembourg this week and of my bilateral discussions there with the Dutch Agriculture Minister.

As of 11:00 am today there had been 1481 confirmed cases of foot and mouth disease. For ease of reference, the House will wish to be aware that I am putting details of the number of cases in each constituency in the library of the House today. This will be updated daily. I am also making available to individual Members full details of the cases in their own constituency, to supplement the early warning system we have had in place for some weeks now.

Over 2 million animals have now been slaughtered for disease control purposes, of which around three-quarters are sheep, 20% are cattle and 5% pigs. A further 475,000 animals have been slaughtered under the welfare slaughter scheme.

The latest figures are that there are 152,000 animals awaiting slaughter and 218,000 carcasses awaiting disposal in Great Britain. The backlog of data not entered on the database which holds these figures has been greatly reduced. Nonetheless, these figures still tend to overstate the position. There is a disposal backlog in Devon of around 85,000 animals and we are addressing this as a top priority. There are no significant disposal backlogs in other areas of the country.

We continue to work closely with the Department of Health on the public health issues surrounding the various disposal routes. There are no completely risk free options. Updated and consolidated guidelines were published on Tuesday. The method of disposal in each case is the safest and most effective in the circumstances.

The House will be aware that the numbers of confirmed cases continue to fall, week on week. From the highest point of 43 cases per day, on average, in the week ending 1 April, the average number of cases has fallen to 16 in the week to 22 April.

We have been able to lift restrictions in nine different areas, where there have been no new cases for 30 days and thorough veterinary and serological testing has taken place. As a result the tighter movement restrictions associated with infected areas have been lifted from some 5,000sq km (some 1¼ million acres) of the country affecting around 12,500 farms.

Mr Speaker, these figures show that we are continuing to bear down on the outbreak. We can be cautiously optimistic about the future course of the epidemic. The scientific advice was that the single most important action we should take against the spread of the disease was to reduce the time between report and slaughter to 24 hours. That has been our policy and it has been shown to be the right one.

The Government's policies for slaughter on infected premises within 24 hours, and on contiguous premises within 48 hours, have been crucial to the control of the epidemic. Following formal advice from the Chief Scientific Adviser and the Chief Veterinary Officer, I can today announce for England a broadening of the existing areas of discretion for local veterinary judgement in the light of the developing disease situation. The devolved administrations will be making their own statements.

The joint advice from the Chief Scientist and Chief Vet follows detailed consultation with the veterinary profession and with the expert scientific group advising the Government on the course of the disease. This development is not - as some have reported - a relaxation; its purpose is to improve the achievement of the policy by refining the instructions given to staff in the field.

The key points are as follows:
· we will continue to kill all animals which are dangerous contacts. That will include animals on a significant number of neighbouring farms (and beyond);· on other contiguous premises, susceptible animals will be killed. Cattle may, however, be spared if there is adequate biosecurity. This will be a matter for local veterinary judgement, taking account of all the circumstances. MAFF have already published guidance, agreed with the veterinary profession, on the biosecurity measures which farmers can take to help protect their animals from infection. Where cattle are not culled they will be subject to regular veterinary patrols.

These refinements can be expected to provide some relief from automatic slaughter of cattle. They will not lead to change in the policy of culling of pigs and sheep on contiguous premises. Pigs pose a high disease risk and can spread the virus. Sheep can carry the disease without showing symptoms, thereby causing further undetected spread.

Following consultation with interested parties, we shall be providing for the special circumstances of rare breeds of sheep and moorland or hefted flocks, based on tight biosecurity coupled with serological testing. Guidance on this will be issued to staff on the ground very shortly.

These are complex matters of scientific and veterinary judgement. The new arrangements have to be right, to ensure that they meet real needs, and contribute to rather than hinder disease control.

I would also like to update the House on the position regarding vaccination. The Government has given serious consideration to a cattle vaccination strategy in North Cumbria and possibly Devon, given the particular issues in those regions, particularly the intensity of infection in certain areas and the forthcoming turnout of cattle from indoor housing to outdoor grazing. The Government accepts the case for vaccinating cattle in those areas, but only if the vaccination programme was supported by a substantial majority of the farming community, by veterinarians, by the wider food industry and by consumers.

As I said to the Agriculture Committee on Monday, that level of support is simply not there and the signs are that it will not now be achieved. Without that support a vaccination programme would be very difficult to implement on the ground. We continue our discussions with all those who would be affected, but the case for a vaccination programme becomes less compelling as the number of daily confirmed cases and the weight of infection in the hotspot area continues to fall.

I turn now to the Livestock Welfare Disposal Scheme. In the first week of April 53,000 animals were slaughtered under the Scheme, rising to 143,000 in the second week of April and over 150,000 last week. Opening the Scheme generated a great many applications, at one stage apparently totalling close to 2 million animals. All applications have now been checked. This process has removed the many duplicated applications (one particular producer made 14 separate applications for the same animals). There are now applications covering some 1.3 million animals. Well over half a million of these animals have now been dealt with, either slaughtered and disposed of or withdrawn voluntarily, or because there was no welfare case to answer. By the end of today the backlog in GB will stand at less than three-quarter of a million animals. We are on course to have completely removed the backlog by mid-May.

The Welfare Disposal Scheme has been put in place to deal with severe welfare problems arising from the FMD movement restrictions that cannot be dealt with by any other means. I am glad that we have been able to extend progressively the options available to farmers to deal with welfare issues and to re-establish routes for their perfectly healthy livestock to be sold into the food chain.

As of Monday of this week, farmers within Infected Areas, but outside the 3km Protection Zones surrounding Infected Premises, have been able to enter healthy livestock into the food chain. As a result of these changes, the vast majority of farmers have practicable alternatives to the Welfare Disposal Scheme. I am confident that the rate of withdrawals from the Welfare Scheme backlog will accelerate as a result.

In re-establishing routes into the food chain across GB as whole, it is imperative that the payment rates for the Livestock Welfare Disposal Scheme do not act as a disincentive to farmers by providing more attractive financial options than the market itself. To ensure that this is the case, I am announcing today that payment rates for those categories of livestock normally slaughtered for meat or meat products have been revised. All animals collected for slaughter or slaughtered on-farm from Monday, 30 April will receive the new payment rates. The rates for cull and draft ewes, new season lamb, clean cattle, and pigs are being revised to a level that represents about 70% current market prices. For hoggets and cull sows a higher rate (of 80%) is being established. Arrangements have been put in hand to ensure that all those who have animals killed under the Scheme are aware of the financial returns they will receive before they formally hand over their animals. It is still my intention that the scheme be reviewed on 22 May. Meanwhile, I shall discuss with the industry the separate market-related issues in respect of light lambs and cull sows that would normally have gone for export. It would be misleading to expect an early resumption of export markets, but taxpayers cannot be expected to buy out this problem.

In my statement of 27 March I outlined a number of actions flowing from our initial assessment of the origins and spread of the disease. The consultation on the proposed ban on pigswill closed on 10 April. We received about 150 responses, almost all of which favoured a ban. A number of detailed issues were raised which we are urgently considering and I expect to make an announcement on this in the next week. We have also received a large number of comments on our proposed 20 day standstill period, after movements on farm, for sheep, goats and cattle. Again the majority are in favour but a number of highly technical issues have emerged. Because of the considerable interest in this issue, I have decided to extend the consultation period for a further month from the initial deadline of 11 May. The cross-departmental examination of the controls on commercial and personal imports of meat and meat products is well underway, and I will have something more to say on this in the near future.

At this week's meeting of the Agriculture Council, I reported in full to EU colleagues the progress we have made to combat FMD, and acknowledged the help which the Commission and other member states have given in this regard. As before, there was strong support for our efforts, and for those of my Dutch colleague, in our determination to eradicate FMD. At the instigation of Laurens Brinkhorst and myself, the EU will convene a conference later in the year to examine all aspects of our experience of this disease, in particular that of the UK and the Netherlands, in order to help shape policy for the future, including vaccination policy.

Mr Speaker, combating foot and mouth disease remains the Government's top priority. But as the disease is brought under control, questions arise from farmers and others in the rural economy about options for the future. We therefore intend to work in partnership with farmers and others to identify ways of assisting the recovery of the farming sector. We shall focus in particular on farmers directly affected by FMD who face choices about their futures, and on those regions of the UK hardest hit by FMD, in particular Cumbria and Devon. As a first stage, Government will concentrate on the need to provide high quality, targeted business and agronomic advice to individual farmers, and will explore ways of improving marketing in the livestock sector to the benefit of the whole food chain. The Government also intends to help livestock farmers to decide the optimum basis on which restocking should take place, taking into account the desirability of rebuilding flocks and herds which are high quality, disease free, extensively-reared and farmed in environmentally sustainable ways. As a further component of our recovery strategy, we shall work with the industry to develop insurance options against both animal disease and the economic consequences which disease brings, and will share our thinking on this with other EU partners.

Work to help farmers emerge from the crisis has begun, and will form part of Government's longer term strategy for helping UK farming to restructure in sustainable, market-orientated and environmentally responsible ways; and taking forward our policy for bringing about CAP reform.

EXTRACT FROM HANSARD ENDS

COMMENTS ON:

House of Commons, 26th April 2001

The statement made by the UK's ludicrous excuse for an agriculture minister was full of hypocrisy and back pedaling word play. How he can dare have the brass neck to use words like, "welfare", "discretion", "refinements", "partnership", "market orientated", "environmentally sustainable", and the indefensible "environmentally responsible" is the epitome of a man deluding himself in a whitewash of Whitehall poppycock and drivel.

"Welfare" - from the very outset he and his MAFFia have never given one bloody hoot about the welfare of the farmers or their suffering animals, sometimes left in quagmire conditions of the most appalling kind to give birth to lambs that then drown because his barbaric rules forbade movement. Welfare is not in your vocabulary Mr Brown.

"Discretion" - like the farmers could assist with 'authorising' their healthy animals to be slaughtered or they could not; it would be done anyway ! Discretion Mr Brown, you do not know the meaning of the word.

"Refinements" - How do you refine an animal holocaust? How do you refine numerous burial pits the likes of which the WORLD has NEVER seen? How do you refine the lack of excuses for UNLAWFULLY slaughtering a million plus healthy animals? Refinement Mr Brown is something you and your nerds need a lot of.

"Partnership" - Like the one between the police, who help engineer access and condone by their inaction and impotence, numerous cases of brutal and inhumane killing of pet animals. Like the one whereby vets who turned a blind eye to their basic instincts and sworn duty to save and heal the sick animal, to one where they were employed to locate and destroy MILLIONS of healthy animals. A partnership that induces a trace and evil undertaking without justification Mr Brown is what you have delivered so far. A partnership where the Army who are meant to defend us from evil, have to wipe the face of the earth clean of your filthy deeds. Lions led by donkeys.

"Market orientated" - What market would that be then ? The one that you have done your damnedest to wipe off the face of British agriculture, or is it the EU one (off our ISLAND, mainland Europe) that you have been told to protect behind closed doors, and nurture by the ludicrous and insane Blitz Kreig caused by a little virus that can't harm the human, but gives our hoofed sentient beings a little bit of a hard time to some of them. Or is it the South American market where we import about 80,000 tonnes of VACCINATED beef from each year - the one that has FMD, but sort of controls it with the vaccine you are scared to death of using ? The one where Zoning is practised, and border controls are so strict that BSE never gets past them - unlike the German experience (is it three times now that the UK has found spinal cord material from German cattle ?). We don't say "boo" to their goose do we Mr Brown ? Still importing from there I see !

Maybe it is the import market we support from Argentina, Uruguay, Namibia, Zimbabwe (Mugabee !) Botswana, Swaziland, South Africa, Thailand, Panama, Paraguay, Croatia, or Poland you want to protect, other than the HOME MARKET we could and SHOULD be supporting. Maybe it really is this £310million /year UK meat export market you are trying to defend, by spending in excess of £20 BILLION of taxpayers money in the stupid process in just over 9 weeks. What sort of fool government plays that game ? I'll answer my own question...the same bloody idiots that spend £750 million on a stuffed porcupine down in Greenwich and then can't sell it after a year; not even after spending £60 million plus of taxpayers money advertising their political expertise as Olympian failures ! 

I am running out of superlatives for your total incompetence Mr Brown, but one final parting phrase I hope will stick in your gullet for a long time is that 24 carat golden lie, "environmentally responsible" cheap shot.

"Environmentally responsible" ..what right have you to even think of that phrase, when you have been the obscene architect of the world's largest holocaust of animals, killed in the most barbaric fashion, burned in the open and blacking the skies - and your reputation - with filth that will never be repeated anywhere in the world.

You, Mr Brown, and your undisputed world champion cock-up artists in MAFF(ia) will be responsible for untold environmental backlashes that mother earth has yet to regurgitate, having been forced fed with two million and more unfortunate innocents.

You and the government should be in the earth with them.

Bryn Wayt
Captain
bryn@wayt.greatxscape.net

COMMENT:

Having endeavoured to keep up with not only learning as much as we can about F&M but also keeping up with and cutting through the spin, dissembling, fudges and outright lies and from speaking with various animal rights avtivists, farmers, vets and many in the general public we have drawn our own relatively informed opinion.

We have consulted with farmers, biotechnicians, virologists, vets and lay peoples in America, Australia, Canada and of course Britain.

We have dedicated many 100s of hours to research into the well being not only of the animals [which Mr. Brown has patently ignored], the well being of British farming [which Mr. Brown has consistently ignored] and the well being of Britain’s position as a Livestock Producer [which Mr. Brown has seemingly sought to destroy].

In all of this research including many face to face meetings we do not believe that we have met a single informed individual not in the direct pay of the EU or their puppets the British Government who would disagree with one word of Bryn Wayt’s analysis of Mr. Brown’s ‘statement’ of shame to The House of Commons.

Greg Lance – Watkins
Greg@GlanceBack.Demon.co.UK 

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