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Mr. Robert McCartney (North Down): Will the hon. Gentleman take on board the fact that in November, during the first debate on BSE, all the matters that the hon. Gentleman is drawing to the Minister's attention were forcefully underlined by several Northern Ireland Members? The papers had not been presented then and they have not been presented now. There is absolutely no evidence that the Minister has done anything that would afford any joy whatever to Ulster Unionist Members.
Mr. Ross: I am concerned about whether the Minister's actions are giving hope to the farmers of Northern Ireland, rather than to politicians in the House. The needs of the farming community should be paramount--rather than pleasing political figures. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for South Down (Mr. McGrady) will get a chance to make his own speech later in his own way, and no doubt he will seize the opportunity, should he catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
In the welter of figures that have been presented, one or two small items seem to have escaped some people. Twice today, hon. Members--one from each side of the House--said that Northern Ireland exported half its beef. That is incorrect. Northern Ireland exports some 80 per cent. of its beef, and it accounted for half the United Kingdom exports of beef. That is a considerable figure, which is bound to be having a depressing effect on the overall UK beef price. The sooner the market is opened up and the beef is exported, the better for the whole country.
The fears that have been voiced in Scotland and at high political levels for Scotland that Northern Ireland will steal the Scottish market are entirely misplaced. We have always provided a different product to a different market. We would not have the productive capacity to undermine the Scottish market in any case, so the fears are sadly misplaced.
I want to raise with the Minister a problem with which he is familiar--the type of beef that Northern Ireland has been encouraged to produce. As I said in my last speech on the matter in the House, we have been producing a large, heavy animal for the European market. Those animals are still on the farm in Northern Ireland; they are in the pipeline and will be there for some time, because farming practice--and, above all, beef production--cannot be changed in a matter of months. It takes several years to do that.
All the time, we find that the intervention weight is dropping--being forced down--and the farmers are being caught with those large animals. There are only two
outlets for those animals: into the continental market or into intervention. The farmers have been badly caught. I hope that the Minister will take the matter on board and do something about it. If we could get the weight for intervention up from 370 kg to 390 kg or 400 kg, a large part of the problem would disappear overnight. Unless the problem is addressed, the farmers will go on suffering grievously. This morning, I spoke to one farmer who produces that type of beef exclusively, and he says that he is taking £300 a head less this year, even with intervention, than he was taking last year. Neither he nor anyone else can survive on such figures.
Mr. David Heathcoat-Amory (Wells):
I am happy to follow the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr. Ross), and would support any application by Northern Ireland for the certified herd scheme to be applied to the Province. I say that as a representative of a county that would not benefit, at least initially, from the certified herd scheme.
Jealousy is an emotion from which farmers are not wholly immune. They are often sensitive to privileges being granted to another country or another part of the country that they feel that they are denied. It is widely recognised, however, that the grass-fed herds in Northern Ireland and the great dependence of the Province on the export of beef put Northern Ireland into a particular category. I believe that the farmers whom we represent in England would be happy to see a successful outcome to any such application, and I was glad that my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister said that he would support an early application that might help the Province.
I have part-ownership of a farm, which is a registered agricultural interest on the Register of Members' Interests. I am not personally much affected by the BSE crisis, but I am certainly affected politically by what has happened over the past 11 months.
I represent one of the biggest concentrations of dairy farmers in the country. That is one reason why Somerset is so well represented in the debate: it is the second biggest dairy county, after Cheshire. My hon. Friends the Members for Taunton (Mr. Nicholson) and for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Robinson) are in their places, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King) has already spoken and we even had a five-minute visitation from the leader of the Liberal party, all of which shows that Somerset has been particularly--I will not say uniquely--badly hit by the BSE crisis.
It has been a depressing and, at times, traumatic year for the people whom we represent. Nevertheless, we can begin to see the BSE issue on a broader canvas and assess the wider implications. I do not believe that many of the criticisms levelled by Opposition Members during the debate have been justified. Many of them have been disproportionate to the evidence available.
It was a tremendous blow to British farming when, on 20 March last year, the Government had to announce a crisis, without announcing how to deal with it. We know the reason for that. There was a newspaper leak, which
would have been shamelessly exploited by the Opposition to raise a food scare to score a party political point, as we know from their actions since then. That meant that, for an unfortunate period of a few weeks, farmers did not know how the crisis was to be addressed. When it became clear that large numbers of animals faced slaughter, the Department was administratively overwhelmed. That point was made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater.
Agriculture is one of the smaller Whitehall Departments, and it was inevitable that it could not cope initially with the huge task before it. A further difficulty, which has been alluded to in the debate, is that the laudable aim of making science our guide overlooked the fact that scientific opinion on the issue was shifting. We still do not know the precise connection between the animal and the human forms of the disease, and we may only estimate the real risks to humans. Those points were made powerfully in an earlier contribution by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Hurd), who explained that science and the politicians could not provide the certainty and the assurances that the rather hysterical press were seeking.
Against that background, it is hardly surprising that it proved extremely difficult to devise a comprehensive scheme to deal conclusively with the problem. I took up many of the issues on behalf of my farming constituents, and I occasionally criticised Ministers and their decisions about the direction and pace of the recovery programme. I hope that I also used the expertise of local farmers to improve procedures nationally.
What is the balance sheet 11 months later? It was never going to be easy to kill more than 1 million cattle in the space of a few months and dispose of the carcases safely. Technically, commercially and administratively, it was a colossal undertaking without precedent in farming history. The only other big crisis that I faced as a Member of Parliament was the introduction of milk quotas in 1984. That measure created a great deal of unhappiness, but it pales into insignificance beside the problems caused by BSE.
My right hon. and learned Friend has naturally attracted some criticism. Agriculture is a highly politicised industry: farmers know that their incomes are affected by Ministers' actions at least as much as by other factors, such as the weather and even their own efforts. The issue was bound to generate great heat and anger, and it was inevitable that much of that anger should be directed personally at my right hon. and learned Friend. As he has remarked on occasion, we are all volunteers in politics. I believe that he showed a great deal of courage, resilience and persistence in supporting farming interests in the Cabinet, and more widely within the Government, and in extracting large sums of money from the Treasury. As an ex-Treasury Minister, I assure hon. Members that that is no mean achievement.
Some £3.5 billion has been committed to the industry as a result of BSE, most of which has come from the British taxpayer. When the hon. Member for Edinburgh, East (Dr. Strang) spoke on behalf of the Opposition, it is significant that he criticised that sum several times. The clear implication is that a future Labour Government would not back their words with the cash and the resources that the scale of the crisis merits.
I believe that my right hon. and learned Friend has assembled a package of measures which, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister promised, has saved the industry. I judge my right hon. and learned Friend on those actions rather than on any supposed deficiency in his telegenic skills. My right hon. and learned Friend has occasionally become impatient--that is his nature. He had my sympathy and support when his impatience was directed at the European Parliament.
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