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Contents

• Introduction
• The impending Death of Agriculture
• Foot-and-mouth the last straw
• Collapse in incomes
• Effects of the destruction
• Fingering the culprits
• Sir Richard Body
• Danger - Maffia killing fields
• Deja Vu!
• The poultry slaughter campaign
• Ministry officials
• Systematic cheating
• Infected feed theories
• Mark Purdey and BSE
• Foot and mouth - the fatal flaw
• The vaccination debacle
• The Standing Veterinary Committee
• Export clearance criteria
• Roots of madness
• Cognitive dissonance
• Lessons learned?
• Enter the Reformers
• The Common Agricultural Policy - CAP
• Castle of lies
• Mad officials
• Critics
• Subsidies & public money
• CAP not the culprit?
• Reform - the party manifesto
• Germany & the greens
• Empty posturing
• Berlin - Agenda 2000
• Enlargement & Poland
• The reality of reform
• Mansholt & MacSharry
• A clean sheet of paper
• Bubble of self-deception
• Murder on the Fontainebleau Express
• Follow the money
• UK agricultural policy
• Maximising the rebate
• Subsidies & competition
• The European scene - EAGGF payments
• Non-discretionary & discretionary payments
• Subsidy disparities
• Ireland competition
• Agrimony & rural development funds
• The roots of parsimony
• Rebate calculations
• The Fontainebleau accord
• National support
• The single market
• Red tape & the Mad Officials
• Red tape - bureaucracy
• IACS, crop assurance schemes and other burdens
• Officials galore
• Mad officials - Environment Agency & others
• Slaughter most foul
• Ignorant blundering
• Double standards
• Low grade harassment
• Regulation and farming
• Survey of Grievances
• Bludgeoned to death
• Farming is no longer fun
• The Deregulators
• Michael Heseltine as 'Tarzan'
• Deregulation & re-regulation
• False perceptions
• Self-maintenance
• Controlling the Leviathan
• Circumventing financial controls
• Next Step Agencies & SEFRAS
• Frustrating the process
• Deregulation - precursor to more regulation
• The Nature of regulatory models
• The intervention model
• Failure not penalised
• Mad Scientists & Killer Eggs
• Hidden killers - government scientists
• Salmonella in eggs & Edwina Currie
• An engineered scare
• Genesis - the EPHLS
• The Thatcher cuts
• The PHLS response - inventing an epidemic
• Ottringham - the golden opportunity
• The real problem
• Cross-contamination & mayonnaise
• Why it had to be eggs
• Hysteria Rampant
• Divisions of responsibility - MAFF & the Department of Health
• Passing the parcel
• Hospital hygiene & cook-chill
• Listeria - Currie's dilemma
• Enter Professor Richard Lacey
• Increase in Listeria - food link denied
• Growing concern
• Eggs as a diversion
• Listeria hysteria
• Acheson's intervention
• Commons Social Services Committee
• Belgian pate
• The sick food of Europe
• Regulatory onslaught
• The Politics of Incompetence
• The enigma of BSE
• The BSE enquiry
• The effect of food safety scares
• Thatcher and eggs
• Damping down BSE
• The early days
• Acheson's 'plague from Egypt'
• The Southwood Committee
• From 'unlikely' to 'most unlikely'
• The Scrapie alibi
• People don't eat cats
• The mother of all scares
• The Department of Stealth
• Licensing and 'regulatory capture'
• Regulating medicines
• Medicines versus beef
• BSE - plausible means of transmission
• The prisoners rattle their chains
• Complacency & leisurely disdain
• Avoid raising public alarm
• A 'sinister fudge'?
• Tyrell and beyond
• Regulation and encouragement
• The Food Standards Agency
• The European disease
• Early EU involvement
• The 1996 BSE crisis
• Dorrell's statement
• The EU ban
• The 30-month cattle destruction scheme
• Hogg in Luxembourg
• EU indifference
• Chaos & confusion
• The selective cull
• The 'beef war'
• The Florence deal
• The hidden crisis
• Ministers climb down
• The new administration
• Lifting the ban
• Smuggling & the regulatory blitz
• The Integrationalists
• The Commission's Food Safety white paper
• Controls on animal feedstuffs
• Cynical response to public concerns
• The Belgium dioxin crisis
• Birds start to die
• Suspicions of dioxin
• The 'Note Destickere'
• Ministry inaction
• The crisis develops
• A fatal mistake
• Political exploitation
• The European Union acts
• Absence of risk
• The 'beneficial crisis'
• European integration
• The Harmonisers
• Entry to the Common Market
• Non-tariff barriers
• Choice of harmonisation
• Damaging effects
• Slaughterhouse sector
• Directive 64/433
• Obsolete standards
• Single market requirements
• New Directive 91/497
• effect on United Kingdom
• Large abattoirs benefit
• 'Food sense - 1992 and You'
• Slaughterhouse closures
• Jim Law and the officials
• plus ca change...
• The Global Power Broker - WTO
• The rigged market
• World Trade Organisation & tariff agreements
• The global political game
• The sugar industry
• Enter Pascal Lamy
• The need for a 'grand gesture'
• Everything but arms
• Quota cuts
• Destruction of an industry
• The banana war
• Beamglow
• Trade wars
• The Common Commercial Policy
• Red Herrings don't Fly
• Farmers contributing to their own demise
• The role of intensive farming
• 'Cheap' food
• The 'greedy' farmer myth
• BSE & Meat and Bone Meal (MBM)
• Battery Hens
• Salmonella infection
• The experience of Sweden
• The role of the supermarkets
• Popular scapegoat
• Government more to blame
• Consumer response to price
• Support & abuses
• 'Greedy' farmers paying out of their own pockets
• Quo Vadis?
• Farmers sinned against
• the National Farmers Union (NFU)
• 'Useful fools'
• Addressing the central issues
• Membership of the EU
• Halfway House
• Multiple problems
• The insoluble dilemma
• Benefits of membership
• The 'elephant in the room'
• The EU dimension
• 'Group bondage'
• Abolition of MAFF
• Red tape & regulation
• Scares
• Whither salvation
• The conditions for change
• Vision
• 'Joined-up' government
• Flaws of a common policy
• Agricultural policies
• The need for rural policies
• CAP objectives
• National rural & countryside policy
• Lack of understanding
• Decentralisation
• The broader policy infrastructure
• Interplay between different policies
• Rural policing
• Public transport
• The role of local authorities
• Subsidise or Die!
• Financial support
• Removing subsidies
• The New Zealand experience
• A North American view
• The other side of the coin
• The subsidy chain
• The case for state support
• Support essential
• Crisis measures
• Sourceof finance
• Agricultural support
• Payment for intangibles
• Differential payments
• Political justification
• Implementation - the 'one stop' shop
• Management of the scheme
• Land tribunals
• The scheme in practice
• Self-help
• Global trading
• Better Regulation
• Complexity of the subject
• A different approach needed
• 'The third way'
• Veterinary Medicines
• A guarantee of safety?
• Nothing can go wrong
• Post-licensing surveillance
• The Veterinary Medicines Directorate - VMD/VCP
• Judges and Juries in their own cause
• Regulatory capture
• Excluding the competition
• An alternative model
• The insurance model
• Genetically Modified Organisms - GMOs
• Freeedom for all
• Planning and other problems
• Dealing with 'Scares'
• The nature of the scare
• The nyktomorph
• Scare elements - universality, novelty, plausibility, uncertainty
• Scares as an artefact
• Structure of a scare - phases
• Limiting the damage
• The appliance ofscience
• Neutralising the scare elements
• Scares in progress
• The Food Standards Agency
• The European Food Safety Authority
• In Paradisum
• No 'happy ending' in sight
• Fantasy agriculture versus vision
• 'World Order' conspiracies
• The rationalisation agenda
• No-one in charge
• Dilution of authority and responsibility
• Circumventing the democratic process
• 'No Minister'
• No salvation in the European Union
• CAP - the least of the problems
• Globalisation
• Fate of agriculture
• Farming needs democracy
• Measurement of decline
• Notes
• Index

Synopsis

Even before the foot and mouth epidemic British agriculture was already in its death throes. Struggling under the onslaught of successive crises - the effects of the Common Agricultural Policy and the bureaucratic demands of the EU; food safety scares from salmonella to BSE; the spread of intensive farming and the concentration of buying power in the hands of retail giants.

British farming has been brought to its knees. Who was to blame? The government, the farmers themselves, supermarkets, the CAP, the EU? In this book, former Environmental Health Officer, Dr Richard North investigates the many causes of farming's imminent demise. His list of suspects is long, and his analysis pinpoints the guilty parties. There may just be a breath of life left in the corpse of British farming, but only if clear and successful policies covering land management, subsidies, government controls and how to deal with scares are formulated.

This keenly anticipated book by Dr. Richard North, documenting and analysing the decline of UK farming comes out on September 30th. He has quite a lot to say about MAFF, DEFRA, The Veterinary Medicines Directorate etc!

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