Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-06-Speech-4-157"

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"en.20010906.8.4-157"2
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"Mr President, I very much regret that this is the second time in six months that we are having to debate foot-and-mouth disease in this House. The reason for our debate is, as the Joint Resolution says, that the measures taken by the UK government to control this disease have failed, that new outbreaks are appearing and that there is a very real risk of the disease spreading again to mainland Europe. We need to ask ourselves why the UK government has failed and why in particular it consistently rejects the idea of ring vaccination in the face of mounting calls from those in rural communities who want to adopt it. It is ever more clear that it is not small farmers' livelihoods, it is not even the tourist industry and the wider rural economy that the UK has as its priority, but simply our meat exports and the desire to regain FMD-free export status again as soon as possible. Yet even this dismal economic justification for culling on such a scale does not stand up. According to the National Farmers' Union the UK earns just GBP 630 million a year from meat and dairy exports. Compare that with the estimated cost to the wider rural community of GBP 9 billion as a result of the foot-and-mouth epidemic. I welcome the call in this resolution for a full cost-benefit analysis between the various disease control approaches so that we can compare the losses that have been suffered under the culling approach to those that would have been incurred under a vaccination strategy. I feel sure that the results will demonstrate that the UK government’s approach is not only inhumane, it is also uneconomical. We are urging the Commission to revise the EU strategy on defending by all means FMD status and to recognise that the culling and destruction of healthy animals is both inhumane and ineffective."@en1
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