Disease Cost Sharing - Timetable Slips

By Justin McCarthy

Farming lobby organisations across the UK have told the government that in the wake of the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) outbreaks in Surrey, it needs to reassure them of its competence to control livestock diseases before imposing cost sharing on the industry.

Former DARD minister, now at DEFRA, Lord Rooker, was in Northern Ireland this week meeting the Ulster Farmers Union. This was part of consultation with the devolved administrations to test the political temperature for the government's ideas. However, the timing, after details emerged of lax biosecurity at the Pirbright animal health facility, could not have been worse.

Conditional

In Northern Ireland, the junior DEFRA minister was told that cost sharing remained conditional on genuine responsibility sharing. But in other regions, where farmers are struggling with movement restrictions because of FMD, the message was more blunt - that the government needed to put its own house in order before trying to pass on costs to farmers.

Speaking after the meeting UFU president Kenneth Sharkey said he believed there was now less urgency at government level for an early decision on cost sharing. He said this was partly because of the FMD outbreak, but also because the European Commission was also looking at this issue, potentially making any UK only approach redundant.

Sharkey said he accepted that taxpayers would not forever go on paying the price of livestock diseases, but he stressed progress was conditional on DEFRA fully accepting the principle of responsibility sharing.

He said that ranged from farmers needing their confidence boosted after the FMD outbreak to an acceptance that TB in cattle could not be tackled in isolation to the reservoir of the disease in wildlife.

Farm Ministers

Meanwhile, during a two-day meeting of farm ministers in Portugal, EU farm commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has called for an increase in the basic modulation rate. She suggested the current basic rate of 5% should rise in stages to 13% by 2013, when the present CAP reform deal ends. During the two-day meeting she also claimed food prices would need to rise sharply this winter to reflect higher livestock feed costs. She described this as evidence that the market was working, and added that it should not pose major problems, since food now accounted for only 11% of household expenditure.

The proposals for the CAP health check will be published in Brussels on 21 November. They will be debated by farm ministers for much of 2008 and will almost certainly be agreed in the second part of the year, when France will hold the rotating EU presidency.