from UK Observer Sunday 4th March 2001

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Sacrifices on the altar of cheap food

by Matthew Fort

Last week we killed 25,000 cattle, pigs and sheep. Why? Foot and Mouth disease is no threat to humans. it isn't much threat to animals either. Most would recover if the disease were left to run its natural course.

The official arguments in favour of the slaughter policy are entirely economic, and designed to preserve the myth of cheap food and protect the interests of an elite of large-scale farmers.

In 2000 the United Kingdom animal-related export trade, in the form of meat, live animals and breeding stock, amounted to more than £1 billion.

This is all based on the UK being designated a disease-free zone. This was a policy we persuaded other European governments to adopt in the early 1990s, and to accept mass slaughter as the means to that end.

These were also the the arguments used by government officials to justify killing 250,00 animals during the foot and mouth outbreak of 1922-24, and every outbreak since.

Nothing has advanced in government thinking in 80 years, in spite of advances in vaccination and other medical techniques, some of them pioneered at the government's own specialised FMD laboratory in Pirbright, set up in the wake of the 1922-24 debacle.

Indeed, vaccination was adopted by some countries as a means of controlling the disease, but in the Alice-in-Blunderland world of international world trade, the use of vaccination meant losing the disease-free status.

Just how little official thinking has advanced is scarcely surprising given the cosy relationship between the upper echelons of the farming and food production industries and government departments.

In the early 20th century relatively few large-scale farmers benefited from the export trade. they used their influence to formulate the official reaction to FMD and to institute the philosophy of containment.

For small farmers, too, the arguments in favour of slaughter are compelling. Were they allowed to recover, the animals would be thinner and less productive. Profit margins are now so small that the farming industry has no incentive to keep such animals alive, and as farmers get paid compensation for their dead animals, it makes more commercial sense to slaughter them than it does to keep them alive.

The commercial imperatives of an elite and the deceitful chimera of cheap food have dictated agricultural policy and the structures of farming for 50 years, with devastating consequences for farming, for its products and for us.

We consumers have gone along with it, as we have gone along with all the other consequences of cheap food policies: centralised production and retailing, and the control of the food chain by a few very powerful companies.

Bargain basement beef, nicely trimmed and packaged; cut price new potatoes in December; and butter basted chickens at 95p per kg ensure we don't pay too much attention to the means by which these titbits come to us.

This situation may be the natural consequences of the drift away from the land to the towns that started in the nineteenth century. Now few people have much idea how our food is produced, and fewer still care, until some hideous complication like BSE of E coli comes along to frighten us. And in this vacuum of ignorance, terrible practices have been tolerated because they delivered the promise of cheap food. In range, quality and cost the situation is a great deal better than it was 50 years ago, but we are only beginning to appreciate the true price.

The central flaw in post-war agriculture policy is that it is based on the principle that more is better and on the flawed precept that agriculture is just another industry like steel or banking, and should be subject to the same disciplines. Farming isn't the same. as far as this country is concerned, more is not better, it is worse: for animals, for farms, and for us.

It is rum that a society that engages enthusiastically in the debate on fox hunting, a marginal case of cruelty at worst, should tolerate, not simply the genocide of thousands of animals, but also the far greater cruelties of contemporary agro-industry. Our silence has been bought by the promise of cheap food.