Farmers treated as second class citizens over TB, says RABDF
DEFRA has been accused of treating English farmers as “second class citizens” over its expected decision against a badger cull to control bovine TB.Lyndon Edwards, Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers chairman, said the decision was a “disgrace” and warned many dairy farms were on the brink of collapse because of the disease.
Mr Edwards, who has a 200 head organic dairy farm in Chepstow, said he had lost 70 cattle over the last three years, costing him hundreds of thousands of pounds.
On the brink
“As well as the value for the cattle, I am losing half a million litres of milk every year,” he said. “I should be getting 35p/litre for it.”
“Lots of farmers are on the brink of losing their business. What is particularly galling is just over the border in Wales, there is a chief veterinary officer who has a brief to control and eradicate TB.
“Why are we second class citizens?”
Mr Edwards said DEFRA secretary Hilary Benn could next expect the industry to work with government in controlling the disease until farmers felt they were being listened to.
Missed opportunity“It’s all very well talking about the successes of bluetongue, but what hope is there of people working together now?
“The gloves are off. Farmers will start to refuse to co-operate to Defra’s bovine TB measures and who can blame them.
“Mr Benn has missed a massive opportunity to control TB in both badgers and cattle.
“He talked about public acceptance, but if the public saw the suffering of infected badgers they would be horrified by the lack of animal welfare.”
And true to their word, they are actively trying to undermine DEFRA:
- Farmers look to frustrate the government after badger cull decision
- Farmers refuse to co-operate with cost-sharing following TB decision
DEFRA is the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It’s remit is almost exclusively English and it is responsible for the incompetent and unworkable scheme used to distribute EU farming subsidies in England. DEFRA’s incompetence at managing the Rural Payments Agency is such that English farmers, unlike their Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts, sometimes have to wait a year or more to receive their money and has resulted in millions of pounds of fines from the EU to be paid by the English taxpayer for the late payments.
I wonder why our farmers are feeling frustrated with the British DEFRA …
Spotted in Farmers Weekly
This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 1:58 pm by wonkotsane, is filed under Farming and tagged with DEFRA, Farmers, TB.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The Farmers union has been contacted in the past about supporting an English Parliament but they were not interested. Serves them right.
July 12th, 2008 at 11:04 amOf cause DEFRA is incompetent it is just MAFF under a different name, which they had to change after the foot and mouth fiasco. People in the public sector who screw up never lose their jobs they just get promoted.
July 14th, 2008 at 5:37 pm