TALKING POINT
TALKING POINT
Making stock farmers
take out disease
insurance policies
has some deep
implications, as
Neil Datson
demonstrates
Never imagine that a policy is too unreasonable for politicians to support it. After a change of rules by the EU agriculture council, DEFRA, prodded enthusiastically by the Treasury, is developing a new wheeze. Livestock farmers are to be forced to pay at least part of the cost of notifiable disease insurance. Initially it will be for slaughter under welfare schemes, although the Treasury wishes to extend it to the compulsory slaughter of infected stock. (Under current EU rules they have to fund the slaughter of infected stock, so they may have difficulty with this part.) At risk of seeming smug, I told you so (Talking Point, Apr 6, 01).
When the idea briefly emerges into the light of public awareness, the logic, for the why-oh-why? school of ranters in the national media, will be inescapable. Other business people pay their own insurance premiums, why not farmers?
The most obvious reason, the reason that government spin doctors will do their best to stop the media noticing, is that only the government can protect the nations flocks and herds from notifiable diseases.
In Australia such insurance would be commercially feasible, as no visitor is allowed to bring in so much as a cheese sandwich. And there are no meat imports from countries where notifiable diseases are present. In the UK, which has the closest thing in the developed world to an open-door policy on food, the naturally risk-averse insurance industry will only offer cover at ruinous premiums.
Supposing the policy is pushed through – and it is almost certain to be in some form or other – then the governments interest in policing food imports would drop even further. To take the extreme position, should there be no cost to the Treasury from a future outbreak of foot-and-mouth, then there is no point in it spending money on preventing an outbreak. The money can be more usefully spent, perhaps on hiring more spin doctors.
With even laxer import controls, risks and therefore premiums would go up even further. Thus there is a beautiful internal logic for a government that appears to believe that the only good farmer is a bankrupt one.
However, there is a further point that needs teasing out. Farmers will not be forced to take out insurance against notifiable disease. Farmers will be forced to take out insurance against the executive, against the government itself.
That is because farmers are not paid if and when their stock contract disease; they are paid if and when the government destroys their stock. It may seem a pedantic point, but it is highly significant. It could lead to some very profitable times for lawyers.
As a small-scale cereal and beef producer, who retails all the meat that the farm produces, I have little immediate interest in the F&M slaughter policy. Faced with the alternative of massive insurance premiums I would be far better off vaccinating my cattle. Even were that impossible, and my cattle contracted F&M, I have read that they could be allowed to suffer the disease and recover naturally. I know almost nothing of the law but I would surely have a strong case if I were to demand the choice of how best and most economically to protect my stock and my interests.
What is being proposed must surely be a first in the history of democracy. The government wishes to make a part of the electorate take out insurance against its policies.
Perhaps theyre trying to tell us something?