NO FOOT AND MOUTH - BUT FARMERS WIPED OUT

22-09-2007

The good news that a Foot and Mouth Scare in Solihull was a false alarm means the cows of the West Midlands are safe for now - but it won't stop the wipeout of our farmers. In the dairy sector alone 11,000 have disappeared nationally in the last five years.

Andrew Hemming has a dairy herd less than five miles from the suspected F&M outbreak on John Cattell's farm in Catherine-De-Barnes, Solihull.

He's delighted that the area has now been given the all-clear, but fears that there'll be no reprieve for those, like him, who are forced to sell their milk for less than it costs to produce.

"We'll be getting 25p a litre from October" Hemming said. "The last time milk averaged 25p a litre or more for a whole year was 1996. If you take that as a base, the true cost now would be 32.8p".

On Thursday the Office of Fair Trading said it had provisionally found that a group of leading supermarkets (Asdas, Morrisons, Safeway, Sainsbury's, Tesco) and processors had colluded to keep the price of dairy products high - a charge they deny.

The allegations centre on the years 2002-2004 when dairy farmers started going out of business in spectacular numbers.

"In 2002, there were about 25,000 of us" Hemming recalls, "but now there are just 14,000."

Hemming reckons that salvation lies - ironically - in the fact that so many of his colleagues have gone under, although he takes no pleasure in their fate.

"They're telling us now there's a worldwide shortage of dairy products. One of the reasons there's a shortage in this country is that so many farmers have gone to the wall, which helps the prices for the rest of us. But there are still too many falling by the wayside."