Crisis in agriculture

IN the past week or so, foot and mouth disease has spread rapidly over the British Isles. Wherever it appears, cattle, sheep and pigs are slaughtered and their carcasses burnt. Everywhere, there is talk of a crisis in agriculture likely to have widespread effects on food supply.

The foot and mouth outbreak raises a number of questions, many of which were, until recently, dodged. For example, since animals usually recover from it quite quickly, and it presents no danger to human beings, doubts are now being expressed about the slaughter policy. The health case seems slight. Essentially, the arguments in favour are economic; animals which have had the disease are likely to produce less milk, or grow less and, therefore, produce less meat. That would reduce profits, and it is more economic for farmers to slaughter the animals and receive compensation.

The background to all this is the expectation, nurtured by all governments during the past half century, that we, in Britain, should have cheap food. The consequences include steadily increasing concentration of supply in an ever smaller number of ever larger hands. Alongside that has been a recent policy - as a response to the earlier bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis - of closing small local abattoirs. Animals, therefore, have to be transported over greater distances to large, more central, abattoirs - a fact which makes more likely the spread of foot and mouth disease.

The effects of responses to BSE (which is a serious threat to humans), to foot and mouth (which is not), and to the commercial consequences of the demand for cheap food, provide an excellent reminder of the interdependent complexity of Britain's agriculture and food production and distribution, a complexity hugely different from the situation 30 or 40 years ago.

During the same period which has seen the growth of the foot and mouth epidemic, parts of the country have been experiencing unusually bad weather, which has disrupted travel and, in parts of Scotland, brought electricity supply lines down and left thousands of people without power. This provides another example of interdependent complexity in a society which has become increasingly reliant on the centralised supply of power and energy. If electricity is not available, many facets of modern life are impossible. To take a mundane domestic example, a gas or oil-fired central heating system will not work without electronic controls, and often, in modern homes, low-tech alternatives do not exist.

Some 40 years ago, my family lived for two years on a canal narrowboat, with no externally provided services of any kind: no electricity, no gas, no piped water. It was fun for a limited time, and we lived comfortably, using oil lamps, gas in portable cylinders, a solid fuel stove, and water from roof tanks filled by hose from a stand pipe.

Of course, there were complications, and we had to devote much more time to the practical business of living than we did when we moved to more conventional housing on dry land. And, of course, it would be totally unrealistic, in our society, to advocate a return to some kind of idyllic simple life, unaffected by modern technology and modern services.

The fact is that we want, and expect, and enjoy modern and generally trouble-free central heating. We expect to be able to buy food in wide variety and at low cost. (The average family spends a much lower proportion of its income on food than it did half a century ago.)

What the experience of the past few weeks has underlined is that the structures which make these things possible are quite fragile. When something goes wrong, the effects are not local and contained but far-reaching.

There are simple things we can do as individuals to mitigate the effects - for example, making sure that we have emergency heating and lighting available in our homes. At the strategic level, however, some fundamental questions will have to be addressed about the balance between cost and convenience on the one hand and vulnerability to risk on the other. The signs are that we have not at the moment got that balance right in our agriculture.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has already suggested that a national debate on the future of agriculture will be necessary. It will be likely to identify a need for changes in both British and European Union agricultural policy. As we contemplate that debate, we shall have to recognise that the necessary changes will undoubtedly have a price tag attached.

BILL KIRKMAN

The author is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. E-mail him at wpk1000@cam.ac.uk

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