Western Morning News (Saturday)
On Saturday Positives can emerge from time of crisis
IT’S funny how history often tidies itself into neat compartments. So as we mark a year since the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in the UK, we are also marking 20 years since the last major health crisis struck.
While foot and mouth, which hit in February 2001, posed no actual risk to human health, it did threaten to not only wipe out our entire farming sector but also our tourism industry.
Much as we have seen with coronavirus, there was a rather piecemeal response to foot and mouth which hadn’t been since in the UK since 1967.
And some of the methods introduced to deal with it catapulted us back to those times.
The apocalyptic images of burning pyres of livestock remains with many of us now.
The slaughter of so many good animals was bad enough but to then have to burn the carcasses to get rid of the disease was something else.
In total, more than 6 million cows and sheep were killed in an eventually successful attempt to halt the disease. But not before many farms lost years of hard work to breed quality stock.
On a less frightening scale, the appearance of disinfectant barriers in farm lanes, as well as foot baths outside public buildings, was as bizarre as it was probably ineffective in actually preventing any spread.
While helping to protect farmers, the decision to close all public rights of way across the country impacted tourism in Devon and had a devastating effect on the Lake District, with Cumbria seeing by far the highest number of cases. Unlike in March 2020, the Cheltenham Festival was cancelled, local elections were postponed and the General Election delayed. By the time that the disease was halted in October 2001, the crisis was estimated to have cost the United Kingdom £8bn.
While there has been nothing quite as strange as working on a newspaper in the current pandemic, the foot and mouth pandemic presented enormous challenges for Western Morning News staff.
Even in 2001, we were still reliant on good old face-to-face visits and phone calls to gather news stories. You couldn’t email a farmer and you certainly couldn’t read about his updates on social media. Journalists had to ask themselves whether it was justified to turn up at farms to report on the crisis.
For the WMN, the answer was often a reluctant no. But while national media flew helicopters over burning fields, we were often first with the real stories.
The farming community was severely impacted by the enforced self-isolation to stop the spread of foot and mouth.
While, mercifully much more shortlived, there are many other parallels with the current pandemic, not least the politicisation of the handling of the crisis under a Labour government.
There was also constant scrutiny of whether urban-centric New Labour and its agriculture minister Nick Brown had the crisis under control.
Despite decimating farming and much of the rural economy at the time, foot and mouth did have many positives, not least that it galvanised huge support for both traditional farmers – and those who used the crisis as a good time to diversify.
It was the start of the “buy local” revolution which has now become a mantra for modern life.
It also galvanised huge support for other rural enterprises, including those who turned to green tourism as a more sustainable option than flying abroad or visiting a holiday park. And it brought about a greater understanding of the farming community – and their relationship with the livestock they raise.
While it’s hard to see the silver lining to the clouds of Covid, the foot and mouth crisis is a good example of how some good will always come from bad.
The apocalyptic images of burning pyres of livestock remains with many of us now