Slaughterhouse

It was a fateful journey. At Cleave's farm in Highampton, sheep passed the disease to cattle; some of the sheep were then sent to a slaughterhouse about 170 km east, while others were bought by a farm in Herefordshire, some 200 km north, causing one more outbreak. Still another batch went 300 km northeast to a market in Northampton. Cleave packed a shipment of 348 sheep off to the British Channel port of Dover, where they were carried to Germany on a livestock ferry.

Since the discovery of the first foot-and-mouth cases at the Essex slaughterhouse, the E.U. banned all imports of British livestock and meat products. But Britain's ban on transporting animals meant there weren't any to export. Indeed, across England, once-bustling market villages turned into ghost towns as commerce slowed, farm families stayed home and people from the cities stopped venturing into the countryside.

The mass incineration of animals—a sight that has become familiar in Europe because of the bse crisis—accelerated. As far south as Spain, 540 pigs imported from the U.K. early last month were killed, though they showed no signs of infection. By week's end more than 25,000 pigs, sheep and cattle had been burned in Britain. The French, in particular, took no chances. "Livestock ranchers who went through earlier epidemics are now saying they'll never make it through another one if it spreads to France," says Marc-Henri Cassagne, director general of the National Federation of Sanitary Protection Groups. "Foot-and-mouth is an old enemy we know only too well."

Given Europe's familiarity with the disease, why didn't governments vaccinate their livestock against it? The answer is that they did, and were successful in keeping the disease in check—until 1990, when the E.U. decided to adopt the British approach to prevention: immediate slaughter of animals thought to be infected. Why? British vets say vaccines can actually make testing for disease more difficult, since it is impossible to tell whether an animal's antibodies come from the vaccine or the virus. And even vaccinated animals can harbor the live virus for up to two years. Says David Tyson, president of the British Veterinary Association: "If you go down the vaccine route, you cannot be declared disease-free." And that makes it very difficult to sell goods overseas. So the decision not to vaccinate was in part an economic one: destroying livestock after they become infected is cheaper than preventing infection in the first place.

Europe's latest bout with foot-and-mouth has served as a kind of parable for the unintended consequences, and the perverse logic, of modern agriculture. Previous outbreaks of the disease, while more deadly, were also more easily contained on local farms. But the liberalization of the European food market means that contaminated products can pass uninspected across E.U. borders. "There's much more movement than there used to be," says David Wilkins, executive director of Brussels' Eurogroup for Animal Welfare. Some critics say E.U. regulations aimed at increasing food safety have also heightened the danger of large-scale epidemics. Health rules put in place to prevent outbreaks like bse have reduced the number of abattoirs in Britain from 1,000 to 387 since the mid-'80s, which means animals now travel longer distances before they are slaughtered. The E.U. also mandates that transported livestock be let out during their journeys to rest and stretch their legs; but that can increase the risk of infection for animals on nearby farms.

Market pressures have contributed to the dilemmas of disease prevention. The large supermarket chains that now control much of retail food distribution have driven down consumer prices partly by centralizing production, cramming livestock into large holding markets and slaughterhouses that are virtual hothouses for disease. "Supermarkets have a big role to play for that because they insist on having all their meat taken to one abattoir to be slaughtered," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said. Add to that the expansion of global trade in livestock and meat products—the market has grown by an average of 9% a year for the last decade—and one can see why so many farmers seem buffeted by forces beyond their control. Farmers in Britain questioned why the government allows the import of any beef from countries such as Botswana, Brazil and Argentina, where foot-and-mouth is endemic. Says Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, an organic farming lobbying group: "The globalization of agriculture is presumed to be a good thing, treating food commodities like processed steel and shipping it around the globe. We don't want that anymore."

Despite the attacks on free trade, the policy that seemed at greatest risk was a profoundly protectionist one: the E.U.'s Common Agricultural Policy, which has sustained the European farming industry through subsidies and price supports for four decades. The cap was devised at a time when more than a quarter of Europe's workforce was employed in farming. Now that figure is below 6%, yet agriculture still consumes half the E.U. budget.

What most irks environmentalists and small farmers alike is that the cap, by rewarding output over husbandry, has led to the "intensification" of farming by large agribusiness interests, which in turn has bankrupted small farmers and eroded food safety. In France, 80% of E.U. subsidies go to just 20% of farms. Overall, figures Ewa Rabinowicz of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, "40% of common resources are spent on 1% to 2% of the working population."

The recent rash of food-safety scares—and the huge cost of "emergency measures" to cope with them—has prompted calls for a greener and more rational cap. Renate Kunast, Germany's new Agriculture Minister, advocates dropping price supports and revamping subsidies to encourage small-scale organic farming, which emphasizes eco-friendly land stewardship, animal welfare and use of natural produce. Other politicians, ranging from Blair to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, have called for a similar reorientation of agriculture policies.

But such reforms face obstacles. Last week the French government defied the common policy by offering $194 million in additional relief to its bse-ravaged farmers. Still, France is reluctant to go along with major changes to the cap, in part because under the current system its farmers receive more cap money than any other E.U. country. And organic farming doesn't necessarily make disease control any easier: the 1967 foot-and-mouth outbreak occurred at a time when small farms predominated in British agriculture. Farmers then kept pigs outside, facilitating the airborne spread of the virus. And for consumers, there's still one major problem with the organic alternative: it's expensive. Shoppers addicted to cheap food are more likely to scoop up the imported products than shell out for high-priced, homegrown organic goods, no matter how safe they promise to be.

For the British farmers quarantined on their land, that may have been the most bitter reality of all: no matter how deep the farmers' pain, the global marketplace will churn on, and people will get their food from somewhere. In parts of England last week the dark mood of rural inhabitants seemed to reflect a sense of betrayal, anger at the overturning of an old order. "Leave us alone," says a farmer in Highampton. "No one cares if we live or die." Adrian Edwards, the local butcher, says he will allow his supplies to run out this week, rather than sell imported meat. "That's not something we're going to do," he says. "There's a principle involved here." But unlike foot-and-mouth disease, such empathy didn't travel far. About 10 km down the road, business is brisk at a brand new supermarket that had every intention of keeping its shelves stocked.

Reported by Anthee Carassava/Highampton, Bruce Crumley/ Paris, Helen Gibson/ London, James Graff and Joe Kirwin/Brussels and Jane Walker/Madrid