Sounding the Alarm to Farmers - 16 March 2001

In the past month or so nothing has been more fully reported - more accurately, more compassionately reported - than the effect on Britain of the outbreak of foot and mouth disease.

Coming on top of the "mad cow" disaster it's hard to imagine two national plagues more likely to devastate a nation's agriculture and consequently threaten its social order and health of its economy.

This week the United States turned from concerned observer to an imperilled victim quickly preparing quarantine.

On Tuesday, soon after we heard of the outbreak in northern France, the secretary of agriculture called an emergency meeting and before nightfall his department had issued a stunning ban on the importation of all European animals and animal products except ones cured, cooked or sealed in airtight containers.

Although we've had an education for weeks now in the history and virulence of foot-and-mouth disease - the last outbreak in the United States was in 1929 - the formal European explanation followed, namely that while the disease poses little if any threat to humans it is virulently contagious and is devastating for cattle, swine, sheep, deer and other cloven-footed animals.

Apart from sounding the alarm to farmers I imagine that many millions of Americans who live far from farms, legions of suburbanites, will have felt a wince or two at the mention of the word deer.

The deer population of the United States is so out of control that some suburban governments and schools routinely warn parents to keep their children off the lawn after dark because so many deer have started mooching for their food in your or your neighbour's background, producing an ethical to do between animal lovers, deer hunters and state rules about the legal destruction of dangerous animals.

The American ban, which stops all exports from the 15 members of the union, provoked the inevitable response from some European government officials that the United States was shooting from the hip at a distant shadow.

But that protest faded before the almost simultaneous ban against French meat that came from Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Norway, to be followed by Germany and Italy.

What is left understood is that any reported outbreak in this country will be followed, as in Europe, by slaughter and cremation or what the French minister of agriculture calls "measures that may seem draconian."

But evidently French scientists agree with the top American scientists that inoculation has a fateful snag. By the universally practised test antibodies in a sick animal are indistinguishable from antibodies in one that's been inoculated.

There's a Nobel Prize or the title Emperor of Europe waiting for anyone who can make a cheap and generally available test that corrects this flaw.

The Bush administration announced on Wednesday that it was about to send 40 American farming experts to Europe to give what help it might to understand the disease better with the rather forlorn hope of learning how to hold and prevent it.

Messages of sympathy from a federation of pork farmers went out to Denmark, which exports 70% of all the pork imported into this country.

The American appetite for pork can be guessed at when you realise that the Danish contribution to American pork lovers is about 2% of what they eat. The United States exports pork to a hundred countries.

I pause to reflect that the more I go over this dreadful story it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury but signifying nothing even close to a solution.

I can only add that on Wednesday the administration - a little late in the day - ordered all airports and other points of entry from anywhere in Europe to begin to enforce the tedious but essential procedure that now confronts all arriving travellers - it used to be only English travellers arriving in France, now it's any traveller from Europe arriving anywhere in the United States - namely careful examination of the person and the cargo and disinfection of the shoes.

I must say this precaution seems to a layman pathetically inadequate, if, as they say, the disease can be carried by a grain of dust or a whiff of wind.

I imagine in my mind's eye the American government, the immigration department, the department of transportation, the state department, even the coastguard, scanning their maps for ports of entry - thousands of them in this great continent - and praying against huge odds that everywhere between Puget Sound and 5,000 miles south and east to the Florida Keys, from the rock-bound coast of Maine in the north east, another 4,000 miles south and west to San Diego, California - praying the every single and cow and sheep and pig and deer and every cloven beast is without fault or flaw.

The very day the French outbreak rang the alarm bell throughout the continental United States and flooded the television channels it ran into another flood.

Together they washed out, in 48 hours, most public interest in Congress, President Bush's tax bill, even in the ever-present disturbance of the Clintons.

The second oncoming flood was, need I say, the roaring downward plunge of the stock market.

This happened to be only the most dramatic movement of a decline that has been going on for a month or two. But the reaction to it was just a little short of panic.

The New York Times printed on Thursday a series of snapshots of the faces of brokers, financiers, money men of all types, in the moment when Wednesday's ticker showed the main industrial stocks in a 300-point drop.

We've frequently talked about the television channel which is devoted entirely to the stock market. It employs a large staff of brokers and financiers and analysts, and we've noticed before that most of them are young people who seem to be very much on top of their trade and are always upbeat about the market and its prospects.

Well, of course, they have to be - most of them are employed by brokerage houses and while they can't in public flagrantly lick the hand that feeds them they tend also not to suggest that you get out of the market and put your money under the mattress or in Harry Potter's vault.

For the first time that I can remember, on Wednesday their faces, many of them very pretty or merrily handsome faces - they never knew hard times - they were glum and the word most often used to describe the market and sometimes by extension the economy was "grim".

Mr Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the federal reserve who's generally regarded as the wizard manager of the American economy, would make no such claim himself and is at pains, every time he appears before a Senate or a house banking committee, to make clear that the stock market is not the barometer of the economy.

Hence to most lay people the odd contradiction when Mr Greenspan echoes many experts in saying that the market is and has been for too long overpriced but that the economy is thriving.

I have seen, lived through, five recessions, or rather one world depression and four recessions.

None of these four stirred up a popular public storm. To most people times might not have been as good as other times but the word recession was almost a technical term.

One of the problems about feeling a recession is that you don't know about it when it sets in. It is a technical abstraction in the sense that the government waits until company earnings have declined after each of three successive quarters. And when that happens the government announces that we have been in a recession for three, six months or whatever.

The most striking thing about this recession, which we no doubt are in, is that every expert, from the president of the United States down to a Wall Street runner, will weave and duck, squeeze through closing doors, swear on the Bible, leave the building, rather than use the word "recession".

The other evening a former secretary of the treasury, with a fine reputation attested to by Democrats and Republicans alike, was asked, after the second loss of almost 700 points in three days, whether the market had bottomed out. He wasn't prepared to say. He didn't know.

"Nobody knows," he said.

He replied - which he could have replied eight months ago - "A correction is long overdue."

This reluctance by economists in general to call a spade a spade is legendary.

A great friend of mine who had the sharpest financial mind called the nasty recession of 1937, bang in the middle of the depression: "A healthy shakeout". And after that, for several decades, the buzz word was "adjustment".

And now when everybody agrees we're in a thumping decline the main function of the smart brokers, the analysts, the commentators and the big shot economists, all the way from Milton Friedman on the right, through centre and pass the ball to the left wing, John Kenneth Galbraith - all are telling us now where we went wrong, who was to blame, why we should have paid more or less attention to global markets - to Japan and Hong Kong - to equities, to reserves, to Third World debts and on and on.

Because economists don't agree on a base of fundamental facts, which any science must have in order to find a generalisation which covers those known facts, I think economists are really varieties of necromancers - astrologers, soothsayers.

In the middle of the 19th Century, was it not, a famous English journalist called economics "the dismal science".

It seems to me the most dismal thing about economics is that it is not yet a science and nobody, but nobody, knows for sure what causes a boom or a bust.

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