Originally from: David
                        
http://www.kc3.co.uk/~dt/farming.htm

A report presented to the the European Parliament's inquiry into Foot & Mouth by a British MEP Jeffrey Titford, leader of the UK Independence Party, shows that, had it not been for the total breakdown of a strategy for the handling of foot and mouth outbreaks by the European Commission, more than nine million animals might have been spared from slaughter and the British economy could have been saved more than £10 billion. One of the best-kept secrets of last year's disaster was the extent to which, under European Community directive 85/511, overall direction of the handling of foot and mouth had been handed over to Brussels. Under a second directive, 90/423, Britain should have had a detailed contingency plan in place, requiring a full-scale emergency vaccination programme within days of the start of the epidemic. However, the report shows how the system broke down at every point, with liability for its failure split equally between the Commission and the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. The first failure highlighted by his report was that, when the Commission in 1990 ordered every member state to draw up a contingency plan for dealing with a foot-and-mouth outbreak, its guidelines did not allow for an epidemic remotely on the scale of that which hit Britain in February 2001. They did, however, require governments to submit detailed evidence that they knew exactly what to do in the event of an outbreak and had sufficient resources in place to implement those plans. The second failure was that Maff's response, as can now be seen from the plan it submitted, did not meet the guidelines and was woefully inadequate. The third failure was that, although the Commission formally approved all the member states' contingency plans in 1993, it did so without examining them. Another requirement of the 1990 directive was that, if an outbreak was anything but small-scale, capable of being overcome by the instant slaughter of infected animals, governments must be equipped to use emergency vaccination. In 1999 the C ommission's scientific veterinary committee issued a confidential report warning that the risk of foot and mouth in the EU was "extraordinarily high". Advising member states that additional measures should be taken "to prevent a local outbreak becoming a disaster", it laid down 10 criteria to determine whether or not vaccination should be used. Governments had to be fully equipped to vaccinate as soon as any of these criteria were met. When foot and mouth was identified in Britain in February 2001, it rapidly became clear that Maff had been caught short in every respect. Within a week at least seven of the 10 criteria requiring vaccination had been met. But because Maff had not complied with Commission guidance, it was forced to rely on the mass-slaughter policy which the Commission had already advised was inadequate even in an epidemic much smaller than Britain's. It will be fascinating to see if the inquiry pursues this evidence that the EU system failed, or whether most MEPs simply close ranks in endorsing the cover-up. (Sunday Telegraph 28 April 2002: Christopher Booker