By Ewan Pate, farming editor

THE RELEASE yesterday of two reports on the causes of last month’s foot-and-mouth outbreak has caused understandable outrage.

The disease may have been contained within the tight six kilometre protection zone around the Pirbright laboratories but the economic effects were felt across the whole country. Up until now all energies have been devoted to managing the movement restrictions and then the progressive return to normality but yesterday many of the representative bodies in the red meat trade signalled that the hour of retribution might be nigh.

The biosecurity lapses revealed by the investigations would almost certainly have resulted in severe penalties had they been identified in connection with a commercial meat business, according to the Scottish Association of Meat Wholesalers (SAMW).

“The biosecurity story told by these reports is incredible,” said SAMW president Allan Jess.

“The fact that a leaking pipe, which is a key focus of attention, appears to have been known about for some time without any action being taken is also totally unacceptable.

“Our members maintain the highest standards of hygiene in their meat processing operations, knowing that any lapse would be met with prosecution and the potential closure of their business. It’s unfathomable, therefore, that the Pirbright site has been allowed to operate under such lax standards and that a known contamination risk was ignored.

“The FMD outbreak has cost our industry a significant amount of money. In addition to the disruption caused by plants being closed for two days and the loss of export outlets for two weeks, significant quantities of meat which had been exported, prior to the announcement of FMD, have now been returned to this country.

“Export relationships, which have been the focus of major investment by many of our members, have also been damaged and will require fresh investment to rebuild the trust which has been lost.

“There are serious cost and liability implications to be considered in the light of these reports, including many within the meat processing sector, particularly given the way in which biosecurity requirements at Pirbright appear to have been ignored and abused. We most certainly do not consider this to be the end of the matter.”

NFUS president Jim McLaren has also obviously been nursing his wrath to keep it warm.

After digesting the content of the reports he said, “The shock of facing a second foot-and-mouth outbreak in six years has been overtaken by anger.

“Scotland’s farmers are struggling to contemplate how a Government facility, established to help protect us from disease, looks to have unleashed one of the most infectious animal diseases on earth.

“I give credit to the authorities for their efforts once the disease was spotted. But the inescapable fact is that it should never have appeared in the first place.

“Our livestock and red meat industry was already struggling with profitability before it was thrown into this crisis five weeks ago. This outbreak has needlessly cost our members millions of pounds.

“I know lawyers will now be poring over this report and we will be looking very carefully at the legal options in front of us.

“I don’t believe the UK Government acted on the lessons of the 2001 outbreak; our controls on illegal meat imports still lag well behind countries like the US and New Zealand. Worse still, the UK Government has lectured farmers about biosecurity since then—those lectures now have a painful irony.

“Farmers will not accept a similarly complacent attitude in response to this outbreak. If as much time was spent on preventing disease outbreaks as discussing strategy for, and costs of, dealing with them, we could avoid these kinds of animal welfare and economic disasters.”

All of this anger presents Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the Environment Richard Lochhead with a political dilemma.

Throughout the last month he has been at pains to point out how closely he has worked with DEFRA and UK ministers in tackling the outbreak. Now that some evidence of incompetence at a state run laboratory has come to light he might be expected to move into a more critical role but yesterday diplomacy was still to the fore.

He said, “I fully understand the anger of the Scottish livestock industry over the biosecurity breaches at Pirbright.

“The Scottish Government has only just received the reports and will need to study them in depth to consider any implications for Scotland. “The reports raise some very serious questions for the UK Government and we look forward to seeing how they will answer them.”

“We also look forward to meeting with UK ministers in the near future to discuss how we move forward from this outbreak.”

These could well be interesting discussions if Mr Lochhead pays attention to the views of Mr Jess and Mr McLaren.