UK – Farming Group Farmers For Action (FFA) has attacked the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) for its report this week on the UK’s foot and mouth outbreak.

The news comes in the same week that the UK was put back on the list of countries that are foot and mouth free by the Office International des Epitoozies. This makes exporting animal produce much easier for the UK.

Speaking exclusively to Connecting Dairy News, FFA chairman David Handley said that he was ‘incensed’ by the NFU’s Lessons to be Learned From the Foot and Mouth Disease Outbreak of 2001 report, which criticises the UK government’s handling of the epidemic.

Handley added that the UK dairy industry was “decimated” by the country’s foot-and-mouth outbreak, with milk supplies “quite badly affected”. However, the dairy industry was not as badly affected as other agricultural areas. Milk co-operative Zenith yesterday told Connecting Dairy News that its suppliers had lost 330 herds in the UK’s foot-and-mouth outbreak, but had seen no drop in milk production because other members had made up for the shortfall.

Contrary to the NFU report, Handley claimed that vaccination could have played a key role in controlling the disease, and that it would not have been necessary for produce from vaccinated animals to have been labelled. He said: “We were advocates of vaccination from the start. It would have saved millions of cattle and we will never make up or the heart-ache that is still going on in the rural community.” The main points in Lessons to be Learned were that controls on illegal meat imports in the UK need to be improved and that the government needs to have a proper contingency plan for such crises. The report also said that livestock movement controls did not balance disease control and commercial needs.

Presenting the report, NFU president Ben Gill said that unless these points were followed up, there was a “very real” danger of such an outbreak happening again in the UK. Gill claimed that vaccinations had not been properly tested, something which “reflects on government cuts into research into animal disease which have been going on for decades”.

This week, Arla Foods announced that its UK dairy suppliers had been badly affected. 60 of its 600 dairy herds that supplied milk to Arla were culled during the foot-and-mouth outbreak.

Yesterday, the UK government released a list of key issues surrounding foot-and-mouth that it feels should be investigated. These include the tightening of import controls, giving vets’ local knowledge regarding the culling of livestock near to infected animals and investigating why the army were not used earlier.