Electric Dirt Farmer

I haven’t really been following the FMD issue very closely, and because I don’t own a television I haven’t seen the on location footage either. Due to time constraints I’m still not focusing on this issue, but I have begun to notice some apparent logical disconnects. Adam Radwanski, in a March 16 article in Pundit Magazine asks the following leading question:

With one of Britain’s leading experts on the disease telling Pundit that slaughters of hundreds of thousands of animals might be a “faintly ridiculous” way of addressing the problem, is it time to look at other options?

The expert mentioned in that quote is Abigail Woods a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine who is researching FMD. Among other points, Ms. Woods notes that the government’s mass slaughter of animals happens to be “a very convenient way of preventing any independent research on the subject,” which means the assumptions — particularly that FMD is a serious health risk — go mostly unchallenged.

It appears (although there is certainly some debate) that foot and mouth is actually a relatively minor disease, from which the infected animals recover fairly quickly. But, according to Mr. Radwanski the health and agricultural facts are secondary to economics in this story. Economics, in this case, referring to the negative impact of the near instantaneous import bans placed on agricultural products from any country that experiences an outbreak of FMD.

The fact of the matter, however, is that the entire crisis is about economics. No country can afford to harbor even a single case of FMD, or it risks immediately becoming an international pariah.

There’s a lot more information in the article: about why the economics of the disease (and the attendant draconian quarantine and slaughter response) dominates, the role that the United Kingdom itself played in that, and particularly the lack of good quality information (as opposed to sensationalism) in the media coverage. And, it is on the issue of the news media’s poor handling of this story that the article concludes.

There are questions to be answered about foot-and-mouth disease – but sadly, nobody is asking them.

(Editor’s Note: Usually, my general disclaimer covers this issue well enough, but this is an agriculture related story so I’d like to especially highlight the fact that the this website’s title doesn’t indicate any agricultural expertness. In fact, I don’t know very much at all.)

Hat tip to Bourque NewsWatch