Over the past weeks the news has been dominated by the story of
yet another crisis in farming. Appalling pictures of funeral pyres of
animal victims of the foot and mouth outbreak have even made the
front page of stateside-based ‘Time’ magazine. What the hell is going
on?
What is going on is capitalism as usual on the farm. ‘Townies’ can
be a bit schizophrenic in their attitude to farmers. On the one hand
you hear about farmers driving around in Range Rovers paid for out of
the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy subsidies. Then you
read the horror stories about smallholders who are only getting paid
£1 for a sheep. Which is true?
They’re both right. On the one hand farming is one the most
cosseted sectors in the so-called free market system. Brussels
bureaucrats dished out £23 billion in subsidies last year –
£3 billion in Britain, where there are just 168,000 farms. That
was just European Union largesse. BSE cost us, the taxpayer, over
£600 million in compensation. It seems the BSE outbreak was a
health and financial crisis for the rest of us, not for beef
farmers! So if someone suggests that occasional disease is a cost of
the cheap food the farmers are providing through intensive
agriculture, don’t forget you’re paying for food twice – once at the
checkout and a second time through tax deductions from your pay
packet.
Farmers should be in clover. But actually it’s the richest 20% of
farmers who get 80% of the subsidies from the public purse. And it is
true, despite the whining from rich farmers that we hear all the
time, that farming is at present in crisis. A supermarket pays 17p
for a litre of milk. But it costs the dairy farmer 22p to produce.
And sheep do sell for as low as £1. The majority of farmers are
struggling. And tens of thousands have left the industry. Ten years
ago there were 233,000 farms. Now only 168,000 are left. 70% of these
farms only provide a livelihood for one person. At the same time
there are 4,000 acre prairies worked by £150,000 tractors
directed by satellite navigation. Farming is big business, with the
little people going to the wall as the big firms flourish. And that’s
where foot and mouth comes in.
The initial reaction of consumers (and that’s all of us) to the
news of the outbreak is along the lines of, ‘Oh no, the food industry
is poisoning us again’. And that’s not true. No human can suffer the
effects of foot and mouth. And the disease is not fatal to the vast
majority of farm animals. It’s the animal equivalent of flu. At
worst, if the disease were left to run its course, about 5% of the
youngest, oldest and weakest creatures would perish. The rest would
suffer discomfort for about the same length of time we suffer from
flu, and then recover. So what’s the problem?
The problem is money. The reason the farm industry has poisoned
our food so often in the past has always been for money. The good
news: a cow now yields 5,800 litres of milk a year compared with
4,000 litres twenty years ago. The bad news: we infected our herds
with mad cow disease to get that result, and the disease jumped from
that species through the food chain to kill humans horribly. To get
milk yields up it was necessary to put a little protein in the
cattle’s diet. To add protein it was necessary to turn them into
cannibals by feeding them with dead sheep and cows. What the present
outbreak has in common with past contagions is that it is ‘an
economic disease’, as some commentators have noted. In the main it
hurts the big farmers who are responsible for the lion’s share of the
£1.2 billion of meat and livestock exported every year.
One of the symptoms of foot and mouth is loss of appetite. And
meat animals are treated by capitalist intensive farming as eating
machines until it is time to go to slaughter. For instance it takes 5
months to get a piglet ready for market. A further delay of a month
or so makes pig breeding uneconomic. As Ian Campbell of the National
Pig Association puts it, "(Waiting) would severely damage the
economics of it."
The mass slaughter is being conducted for one reason – because it
is the most profitable course of action. As Matthew Fort says
(Observer March 11), "Commercial operations, of which farming are
one, are designed to make a profit. You can no more expect them to
put social consequences above that need for profit than you can
expect a great white shark to become a vegetarian."
Most of us, including most meat eaters, are horrified at the
scenes of unnecessary slaughter from the country. Who is taking these
decisions on our behalf? For the farming industry and the Ministry of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food there is no alternative. The farmers
are represented in the corridors of power by the National Farmers’
Union. In fact the NFU pushes the interests of the big
agribusinesses. The MAFF, in turn, is supposed to represent our
interests to the farm industry. In fact for decades the Ministry has
misrepresented the interests of agrarian capitalism to the rest of
us, and has not hesitated to cover up the fatal consequences of
cost-cutting, right up to the last moment. They led the whispering
campaign against Richard Lacey, the microbiologist. who predicted in
1988 that humans could catch CJD from eating beef infected with BSE.
There are alternatives to shooting the animals and burning the
bodies. The first one is to let the disease run its course. We don’t
actually know when the virus first started to cause outbreaks. Before
the twentieth century, the only option for farmers was to put up with
the loss of output. The problem is that foot and mouth is quite
incredibly infectious. It can be borne on the wind for quite a
distance, so it is likely that the entire population of farm animals
in the country would go down with it. Capitalist farmers affect to
find this insupportable. In fact all they have to do is sit tight and
wait for the compensation.
The second alternative is vaccination. Again there is no technical
problem. The form of foot and mouth we are confronting (type ‘O’) has
a well-developed and effective vaccine available. There are millions
of shots of it stored in the European Union for use. But it’s
expensive. Farmers have to pay for the vaccine. But if animals are
slaughtered, we the taxpayer foot the bill for compensation. As the
President of the British Veterinary Association comments, "You’re
balancing costs with benefits." In other words it’s all about money
again.
The other problem about vaccination is ‘the British’. That’s not
you and me, of course. We never get consulted about matters of food
safety and animal welfare. But the big farmers in the NFU lobbied the
MAFF and the MAFF lobbied the European Commission. The French,
Germans and some other governments were all in favour of a policy of
mass vaccination against foot and mouth. The European Commission was
persuaded by the British farm interest that vaccination showed there
were still traces of the disease in a country. And if you have traces
of the disease in your country, you shouldn’t be allowed to export
into the single market. This is a never-never land argument! It means
that the only policy left to an exporting nation is mass slaughter.
In 1967, during the last major outbreak, 400,000 animals were
destroyed. And there will be further losses for hard-pressed farmers.
We are entering the lambing season. Ewes have to be brought indoors
to give birth. But in quarantined areas they can’t be moved. "This
morning at 5am., farmer Meirion Lloyd will have trekked four miles to
pick his dead lambs out of pools of blood in the mud. Some might be
hanging stillborn from their mothers. Others will have died from cold
and starvation. Rain will be pounding their field in north
Wales."(The Guardian, 10th March) These sheep are unaffected by foot
and mouth.
In any case why are animals shipped such long distances? It causes
stress to the creatures and harms the quality of the meat. Again the
reason is the scams and quirks of food as a capitalist business. Most
meat customers are prepared to pay over the odds for home produced
meat. Now the requirements for acquiring a new nationality for farm
animals would make the Hindujas envious. Two weeks’ residence in
France makes a sheep a French sheep! This concession was made because
of the lobbying of the ‘British’ (the MAFF and the big farmers) who
have spearheaded the drive for deregulation and neoliberalism in the
European Union. So sheep reared in Britain are taken on long
traumatic journeys to France or other continental countries. Once
they’ve acquired French nationality, any attempt by the sheep to
explore their new Gallic identity is cut short by a bolt in the head.
The European Union has regulations on traceability. We need to
know where meat has come from. With all these food scares, quite
right too. In effect livestock travelling across borders should carry
a passport. These regulations were opposed by the ‘British’ (you know
who) on the grounds that this was the nanny state shackling the
animal spirits of entrepreneurs – in other words the right of rich
farmers to poison us. The European Commission started taking action
against the UK to enforce traceability two years ago. They were
brusquely ignored by a Labour administration that grovels to
capitalism
One reason why livestock are transported long distances within
Britain is because many of the small local abattoirs have closed
their doors. The slaughtering industry is going the way of the rest
of the food industry – the big firms engulf the little ones. The
original outbreak of foot and mouth seems to have been in
Heddon-on-the-wall, outside Newcastle. This farm was a revolting slum
with rotting pig carcasses lying in the pigpens with the live
animals. It should have been closed down on health and safety grounds
long ago. It was linked to a slaughterhouse in Essex, hundreds of
miles away. Pigs from the farm were sold at a market in Carlisle to a
farmer from Dartmoor – again hundreds of miles distant. This operator
is described as a farmer, but he seems to be a dealer or speculator
in livestock – prepared to drive all over the country in search of a
bargain. Of course what all this travelling does is to immediately
amplify any localised outbreak into a national disaster. If we still
had the local abattoirs any local infection could be contained.
‘Globalisation’ in the food industry means we import beef from
Namibia while exporting home produce all over the world. Naturally to
be shipped such distances the meat must be treated with chemicals and
processed. And imported meat can spread the disease. Southern Africa
has seen outbreaks of type ‘O’ foot and mouth recently.
This is not really a farming crisis. It is a crisis of the
countryside. Most people who live in the countryside are not farmers.
John Major can forget his fantasy about ‘old maids cycling to holy
communion through the early morning mist.’ Country dwellers in
affected areas are effectively under house arrest. They can’t even go
to church! Rural schools have been closed because of the epidemic.
Normal everyday life in the country areas has ground to a standstill.
Farmers don’t own the countryside. It belongs to all of us.
Millions of city dwellers use the countryside every weekend for
recreation – walking, cycling, riding, sports and sightseeing.
Farmers are just custodians of the countryside. And their industry
has sealed it off from us. Rural tourism is reckoned to be a
£1.2 billion industry. So far the hotel owners, bed and
breakfast accommodation, tea shoppes and country pubs have been
haemorrhaging £100 million a week. This compares with the
£30 million lost to the farmers. The streetwise commercial
farmers already have their hands outstretched for compensation. But
the tourism industry will never get that money back. Country tourism
actually provides five times as many jobs as farming. And as we come
up to the crucial Easter and May bank holiday weekends, it looks as
though the country will still be closed for business. The owner of
the Wasdale Head Inn works it all out. He’s lost £26,000 so far
because there are 600 sheep in the valley worth £30 each. "At
local market prices…I could have bought every single beast in the
valley and have money to spare for a great night out. I could buy all
the sheep, slaughter them, let the walkers and climbers back in and
remain open for business – it would make more sense." This is the
logic of the policy carried out by Nick Brown at the behest of the
big farmers. This is the logic of capitalism!
Country dwellers have all sorts of problems which have been
compounded by the present crisis. Rural Post Offices are going to the
wall. The Post Office is a publicly owned business. It ought to be
publicly accountable. But its managers have been instructed to
maximise profits, and minimise costs, just like a private firm. The
other hub of village life apart from the shop/post office is likely
to be the pub. Four or five country pubs a week cease trading.
Usually they are turned into upmarket housing. The influx of
commuters and affluent retired people into villages drives up house
prices beyond the reach of many who were born there. And Labour has
failed to deliver on its manifesto pledge to save country bus routes,
a lifeline for those who can’t afford a car.
Farmers are just one link in the food chain. Compared with the
supermarket chains, they are small fry. So the supermarkets, through
their buying power, have farmers by the short hairs. Fifty years ago
farmers got 50-60% of the price of food returned to them as revenue.
Now it’s only 9p in the pound. Last year the Competition Commission
took a look at supermarkets. It wasn’t easy. Their suppliers would
only give evidence if they were granted anonymity. The Commission
spoke of ‘a climate of apprehension’. ‘Fear’ would be a better word.
They had such leverage over small farmers that ‘a request amounted to
the same thing as a requirement.’ In particular the big chains made
‘requests for retrospective discounts’. They were demanding money
with menaces! It’s true that Tony Blair recently had a pop at the
supermarkets for the food crisis. But with the likes of Lord
Sainsbury in the government, they’ve had an easy ride since 1997.
The farmers respond to the pressure from supermarkets in the only
way they know: by relentless cost-cutting. This is inevitably at the
expense of animal welfare and our food health. A broiler chicken
reared for sale in a supermarket lives out its life in a space the
size of a sheet of A4 paper (the size of the front cover of the
Socialist Appeal journal!). No wonder ‘Which’, the journal of the
Consumer’s Association, found 22% of poultry were riddled with
infections. We have paid a very high price for these economies in
the food industry. But the firms who cut the corners are not the
people who pay the bills in terms of disease and all the other social
costs. The Irish, the French and Germans too are understandably
furious as they are forced to slaughter thousands of imported
livestock because the ‘dirty man of Europe’ has yet again failed to
exercise any minimum of control over the drive for profit in the food
industry. They will have to pay the price. Britain remains a country
where capital is king and where the civil service is imbued with a
Thatcherite, neoliberal attitude of indifference to the public
welfare. This after four years of a Labour government!
What the crisis shows is the conflict between the profit motive
and the wider social interest. It is easy to blame farmers, but they
are just a cog in the money-making machine. We cannot go on like
this! We need a fundamental rethink of our food industry. Individual
farmers can’t change things. They’re cutting corners because they
have no alternative. They are responding to market forces. Market
forces are not an expression of what people want. We don’t ‘vote’
with our money to be poisoned. Market forces are the way the rule of
profit imposes itself on us. We can have healthy nutritious food from
animals reared in humane conditions. Or we can have a capitalist food
industry. We can’t have both.
