Foot in mouth
Sir: The foot-and-mouth outbreak in Surrey may or may not have been Shambo's revenge, but it certainly had nothing whatever to do with 'farmers purchasing illegal meat supplies from the Continent for cattle feed' as Rod Liddle bizarrely suggested (Liddle Britain, 11 August). Farmers do not use meat, imported or otherwise, as cattle feed. A complete ban on feeding mammalian protein to ruminants was introduced as long ago as 1990.
The only compensation paid to farmers in foot-and-mouth outbreaks is for the animals that the government takes and slaughters. So farms that didn't get the disease in 2001, but which were effectively closed down for months on end by the FMD restrictions, were in precisely the same position as rural tourism businesses: massive loss; no compensation.
Finally, the National Audit Office calculated that the net cost of the 2001 outbreak to the taxpayer was around £3 billion (not Rod's £8 billion). The uncompensated costs to farmers were around £2 billion and to tourism around £5 billion. Everybody loses from foot-and-mouth disease.
Anthony Gibson Director of Communications, NFU
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