FMD 2001
By: Carlo CaduffIn the last chapter (entitled “Death”) of her new book, Dolly Mixtures, Sarah Franklin comments in interesting ways on the food and mouth crisis of 2001 and the so-called slaughter policy.
In the last chapter (entitled “Death”) of her new book, Dolly Mixtures, Sarah Franklin comments in interesting ways on the food and mouth crisis of 2001 and the so-called slaughter policy.
August 25th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Pray tell…what does she say?
August 25th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Franklin’s book explores the complimentary and contradictory ways in which sheep have come to matter to people (in Britain and beyond). Here is a short summary of her interesting take on the 2001 food and mouth disease crisis. Franklin addresses the crisis (as well as other events) in the last chapter of her book.
Food and mouth disease broke out in February 2001 and quickly spread to sheep flocks throughout Britain. By September, 3,8 million animals had been slaughtered. As Franklin nicely points out, it was difficult for modern people living in urban London to comprehend “what a pall the epidemic cast over huge but sparsely populated areas of Britain”. Regular readers of The Guardian were indeed at pains to understand why farmers and peasants were so outraged about the destruction of their herds (destined to be slaughtered at some point anyway). Franklin not only points to the complex affective relation of farmers and peasants to their animals, but also to the fact that the destruction of entire herds concomitantly eliminated “ancient lines of stock owned by generations of families and irreplaceable herds of carefully bred varieties.” At stake was not only and simply a living mass of cattle and sheep to be replaced with the help of the compensation money promised by the federal government, but rather, and more importantly, flocks of animals literally incorporating past efforts and future anticipations. The true object of destruction and elimination was the material relation between past and future that animals were made to incorporate in modern agriculture. Genealogy, Franklin argues, matters to farmers in ways that few people even in genealogy-obsessed Britain would have expected. There are things in the world that are not so easily replacable with a couple of dollars or pounds.
On a somewhat different, but equally interesting, although less explored register, Franklin observes: “A particularly painful irony of the unprecedented slaughter of millions of British cattle and sheep was that food and mouth has never posed a risk to human or animal health”. The slaughtering of millions of animals was legitimized by reference to the economic division between FMD-free and FMD-affected countries. Franklin puts it nicely: “Foot and mouth is only lethal to domestic animals because it is economically intolerable to humans.” The cost of this on-going policy is immense.
Here is a comment taken from a recent report:
“Two factors from 2001 continue to loom large: the image of a countryside closed to the public and littered with pyres of animals, and the enormous cost now put at some GBP 9 billion [USD 18.1 billion]. About half of that was incurred by nonagricultural rural businesses, yet because they lacked a powerful lobby group such as the NFU, they received almost no compensation. “Yet non-farming rural businesses employ more people than farming and can more fairly claim to be the backbone of the rural economy.” Indeed, says Johann Hari in the Independent. The British beef export market brings in GBP 700 million [USD 1.4 billion] a year and employs fewer than 40 000 people, while tourism brings in more than GBP 70 billion [USD 140.8 billion] and employs nearly 2 million.” Franklin, I suppose, would point out that tourism and agriculture cannot be separated so neatly and that they are entangled in complex ways. In modern economies and nations, sheep stand not only for agriculture but also for the semblance of nature that urban tourists are desperate to consume.