NFU Scotland has rejected a recommendation from a Parliamentary Committee for the agricultural industry to pick up the cost of disease outbreaks. The Union was reacting to the publication today of a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee into the lessons to be learned from foot and mouth.

Since the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, NFUS, together with other UK farming unions, has been campaigning for tougher food import controls to reduce the risk of importing disease.

NFUS has stressed that farmers have a critical role to play in disease prevention through continued improvements in biosecurity. However, it is completely unacceptable to ask the industry to pick up the cost of disease outbreaks such as foot and mouth or bird flu which are imported into the UK, when our border controls, over which the industry has no control, remain inadequate.

NFUS President John Kinnaird said:

"Taxpayers would have been best served by this Committee report if it had concentrated on spending money to prevent disease ever entering the country, rather than arguing how to manage it and who picks up the bill once it has arrived.

"There is no question that the industry has a duty to ensure biosecurity is as robust as possible and to do everything else in its power to reduce the risk of disease. However, it has no control over the disease coming into the UK in the first place. The industry will do its bit, but the UK Government simply cannot wash its hands of its own responsibility to prevent disease entering this country.

"The National Audit Office has already painted a pretty damning picture of our meat import controls. We are laid open to further disease outbreaks and, to make matters worse, this report effectively asks farms to live under this threat and foot the bill for something over which they have no control and government is failing to adequately address.

"There are many lessons to be learned from foot and mouth, particularly in relation to biosecurity and the valuation system. However, no lesson is more important than the need to strengthen our defences against imported disease. That should be the motivation behind government activity, not an attempt to save money by passing the cost of these disasters onto the victims."

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