Warmwell.com
From
Private Eye
August 17-30 2007 |
|
Nothing
better illustrated how difficult the media find it these
days to relate to the realities of the farming world than
a chilling interview on the Today Programme just after
8 a.m. on Saturday 11th August.
John
Emerson was the free-range farmer at Hunts Hill near Pirbright
who three days earlier had seen every one of the 362 pigs,
sheep, cattle and goats on is farm destroyed by DEFRA
as a "precautionary" measure, after one of his
pigs developed a slight limp. Two days later, DEFRA's
FMD experts announced that his dead animals had all tested
negative.
So
ill-briefed was the Today presenter, Caroline Quin that
she began the interview by suggesting that he had lost
"362 cattle". Politely Mr Emerson corrected
her. As their exchanges continued, it became clear that
they inhabited two quite different worlds.
Ms
Quin seemed remarkably unconcerned by the fact that Mr
Emerson's entire stock had been destroyed on the basis
of an official blunder, and that he had just seen his
entire life's work wiped out for no good reason. She blithely
mentioned "compensation", as if this would make
up for what he had lost. When she asked him what he was
up to at that moment he began to explain that normally
at that time on a Saturday morning he would have been
packing up to take his meat to market, but now he had
nothing left to do.
This
glimpse of how completely Mr EMerson's life had been turned
upside down floated right past the Today presenter as
she stuck to her chosen brief that not all in the farming
world was "doom and gloom". She then moved on
to interview Sean Rickard, the former NFU economist who
is one of the BBC's favourite "farming experts",
to put over the meesage the Today programme wanted its
listeners to hear: that there is still plenty of money
to be made out of farming, by the type of agri-business
favoured by the NFU and Dr Rickard.
Almost
everything about the FMD outbreak of August 2007 has been
a tragic reminder of just how little has changed since
the 2001 epidemic. As a symbol of DEFRA's catastrophic
incompetence, it was of course only too appropriate that
the virus should have escaped from its own cash-starved
and rundown laboratory at Pirbright, which laughably is
the "world reference centre" for research into
FMD. Even though this latest outbreak seems fortunately
to have been so limited, Defra has still struck another
devastating blow at the livestock industry, with its ban
on the movement of animals (except for slaughter) anywhere
in England. If the media in general floundered in their
attempts to understand what was going on, at least one
comprehensive source of information has been available
to anyone wanting to follow in detail the convolutions
of this latest episode. One of the few bright spots of
that dark time in 2001 was the website www.warmwell.com,
run from near Bordeaux by an expatriate English teacher,
Mary Critchley. Within weeks she had established warmwell
as the most reliable clearing-house for expert information
on the FMD crisis, and miraculously, having made contact
with all the most authoritative scientists in the field,
she has remained in business ever since.
Yet
again in recent days, Miss Critchley has been working
overtime, telling us a great deal more than we learn from
the BBC.
Muckspreader
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