Industrial welfare and a healthy economy are what really matter

Foot-and-mouth is not really an animal disease - it's an economic one. It arrived in Ireland as a result of international trade and it was international trade which made its rapid eradication imperative.

Animal welfare scarcely came into it. This is because at least 95 per cent of the animals which contract the disease recover quickly and without problems. In sheep, pigs and goats the infection can be so mild that it passes unnoticed.

Cattle go off their food, shiver and milk production falls for two or three days. Generally, though, they recover in less than two weeks, although in some animals milk production might be permanently impaired or there might be a permanent loss of weight. Some young animals might die and some in-calf cows might abort.

Even so, the consequences of the disease seem to be very much milder than the slaughter-and-destroy methods used to eradicate it. Nevertheless, the idea persists that the effects of the disease are serious.

The Economist wrote recently that it "vastly lowers" animals' commercial value by reducing weight and milk output. How does the magazine know? According to Abigail Woods, a British vet, "there are no figures for how much it reduces these things: part of the reason for that is that no one since the 1920s in Britain has seen the disease take its full course."

If the disease is really so innocuous, why were so many animals slaughtered in the UK in an effort to stop its spread? And why were so many meetings, conferences and sports fixtures here totally unconnected with farming put on hold for the duration of the outbreak in a heart-warming demonstration of collective concern?

And why, only after millions of pounds worth of cancellations, did the Government start trying to convince potential tourists that they need not stay away?

The answer is that had the disease become widespread here, Irish meat would have become unsaleable overseas. This would have been serious, because roughly seven out of eight animals are exported. This merely raises another question: why would other countries ban imports of Irish meat since everyone accepts that animals that carry or have carried the virus are perfectly safe to eat?

The answer is that meat imports would expose their own herds to the risk of catching foot-and-mouth disease too. According to a 1994 study for the US Department of Agriculture, of more than 600 foot-and-mouth outbreaks around the world, 71 per cent of those between 1870 and 1969 were due to infected meat, meat products or meat waste.

Of the rest, 24 per cent were explained by the airborne transmission of the virus, sometimes by birds, and 2 per cent by imports of infected livestock.

Since 1969, however, with the increase in world trade, the pattern has changed and animal imports have become the main source of the disease, responsible for 36 per cent of outbreaks. Both main causes were involved in the recent outbreak: imported meat used in pigswill is said to have introduced it to Britain and animal imports brought it across the Irish Sea.

Countries naturally want to keep their animals free of diseases even if the illnesses cause only a low level of economic losses. Consequently, Ireland needed - and must continue - to keep itself free of foot-and-mouth if it is to carry on exporting meat.

However, this shouldn't mean that should there be an outbreak, we can't use vaccination rather than slaughter.

The vaccine contains dead virus and at least five different tests have been developed to enable meat inspectors to distinguish between the antibodies it produces from those produced by exposure to the live form.

If our export markets proved fussy, we could always eat the meat from any animals vaccinated to control the disease ourselves.

So trade rather than animal health is what the foot-and-mouth crisis is all about. Once Ireland, North and South, has recovered from this one, permanent trade restrictions are going to be necessary to minimise the risk of anything similar happening again.

International trade has been pretty bad for Ireland from the pests and diseases point of view anyway. It introduced the New Zealand flatworm which threatens the fertility of our soils by eating earthworms. It brought bonamia, a parasite which reduces the yield of the native oyster, from California to France and from there in seed oysters to bays around Irish coasts.

It eliminated the elm as a timber tree after a shipment of rock elm for boat-building from North America brought beetles carrying Dutch Elm disease to England. The bugs then travelled over here. And it was trade that brought the potato blight across the Atlantic and caused the Great Famine.

So trade has both costs and benefits. There is no such thing as free trade, if you take free to mean without cost, that is, without a downside.

Foot-and-mouth disease is being called Free Market disease in Britain and Ben Gill, the president of the British National Farmers' Union, is asking questions about the economic policies which brought it about.

"Is it a coincidence that we had classical swine fever in East Anglia last year of an Asian origin and foot-and-mouth now, also of an Asian origin? It raises questions about freer world trade," he said recently.

On the completion of the single market, the Government lost the power to ban meat and live animal imports from our EU partners except in response to a disease outbreak. The problem with this is that such a ban might be too late to stop the disease getting here, as it was in the current foot-and-mouth crisis.

If the Government can no longer use the law to protect the agricultural sector, the sector is going to have to protect itself. Such a strategy would mean, for example:

Meat processors would no longer import carcasses for processing. The bacon companies, which have been bringing in large quantities of pigmeat would have to restrict themselves to Irish suppliers.

No one would import animals from Britain just to enable them to be slaughtered here and sold as "Irish beef" or "Irish lamb". Only pedigree animals would be imported under strict quarantine arrangements for use as breeding stock.

Marts, almost purpose-built for passing diseases around, would be closed. Casual pass-the-parcel trading in animals would stop. Instead, farmers would adopt "closed herd" policies and sell their animals direct to local abattoirs from the farm, as is done in Sweden.

A culture would be created in which anyone who broke the industry's code would be treated as a pariah.

To some extent, the Irish shellfish industry is already operating on these lines. Ten years ago, after bonamia was spread by rogue dealers, it became concerned that the single market would make it impossible to stop other pests and diseases arriving on imported juvenile shellfish (seed) for growing on here. It therefore adopted a self-policing policy.

Ritchie Flynn of the Irish Shellfish Association says this has been successful. "By dealing only with seed suppliers we trust and by carrying out spot checks, we've kept most of the nasties out," he says.

He accepts that importing even reliable growers' seed also carries a risk of importing diseases, but Irish-produced seed is too costly to enable shellfish farmers to be competitive. By importing, however, the industry needs to recognise that it is jeopardising the long-term fecundity of Irish shellfish beds for the sake of its survival today.

Unless the cattle trade is prepared to use similar social and economic pressures to get its cowboy dealers and processors under control, it has no right to ask the wider community to help it out the next time an outbreak of foot-and-mouth occurs.

The Irish Tourist Board estimates that tourism could lose £500 million this year as a result of the outbreak and that 30,000 jobs may go. Other sectors are suffering big losses too and many people's social lives were badly curtailed at the height of the crisis.

All the sacrifice will be worth it if the whole island's foot-and-mouth-free status is restored, but we mustn't be asked to go through it all again unless the livestock sector learns from its experience and puts its house in order.

In future, the rule should be that we'll only help people who have done everything they possibly can to help themselves.

Richard Douthwaite is an economist and environmentalist living in Westport, Co Mayo