Archived News

8th September 2007
At midday the Foot and Mouth restrictions were lifted! The 10km zone around Normandy has been removed, leaving the 5km temporary zone around the Institute of Animal Health (IAH) and Merial Laboratory. The movement of livestock can return to normal after four weeks of restrictions.

The Chief Veterinary Officer confirmed on 7 September that Foot and Mouth Disease has now been eradicated from Surrey. We now move towards regaining international disease free status. The earliest date for this is 7th November, three months after the last case. Restrictions on direct exports from the former suveillance zone will remain in place until international status is regained.

The recent Foot and Mouth outbreak was in the news for a while and then it dropped off the radar even though it was still seriously affecting thousands of livestock farmers throughout the UK, not just those in Surrey.  Unfortunately the media don't often go into the wider story, they are seeking the dramatic pictures of the moment; upset farmers and dead livestock, where as they could give so much more of an insight into how this affected an entire industry, the length and breadth of the country.

I think the general public would have be interested to follow the day-to-day life of a Welsh sheep farmer unable to go to market or dairy farmers unable to get their milk collected and having to throw all the milk away.  So much more has happened behind the scenes.

The Secretary of State for the Environment, Hilary Benn said on Friday that farmers who lost livesock due to FMD have been compensated. Well it seems that the compensation is the current market value of an animal such as a pig at £70. Mr. Emerson used to sell his meat at farmers markets and in a farm shop, no livestock went to market. The meat from each of his pigs (there were about 300 of them) was worth £300 to his business not £70. In addition to these losses a cold store full of meat worth £10,000 was classed as contaminated and was destroyed. After culling these pigs, cattle and sheep, tests proved negative for Foot and Mouth.

Farmers livelihoods have been put in jeopardy due to a catalogue of errors at the Pirbright Site and briefly this re-entered the news on Friday as reports were published from the Health and Safety Executive, and Professor Brian Spratt of Imperial College London.

The upshot of these reports is that there were five breaches of bio security.

The HSE found evidence of long term damage and leakage to the site drainage system including cracked pipes, unsealed manhole covers and tree roo ingress. There has been a 'discussion' since 2004 between IAH, Merial and Defra about who should pay for maintenance of these pipes.

Even though Hilary Benn is at pains to stress that a series of unfortunate events caused this FMD outbreak. It seems quite clear, that had the drainage system been regularly inspected and repairs undertaken this outbreak would not have occurred.

The two reports conclude that many improvements are required at the Pirbright site to prevent a similar outbreak from occurring again.

In these circumstances the Government should fully compensate the farming industry.

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