Illegal meat seizures and foot and mouth scare should be a wake-up call

The recent foot and mouth disease case in Germany has highlighted weaknesses in the UK’s biosecurity at borders, but we must make the distinction between legal commercial shipments of meat which the Border Target Operating Model is there to manage and which are all pre-notified with full export health certification, and the illegal meat being brought in to the UK in smaller vehicles that can only be detected via a system of intelligence and spot checks at the ports.

For illegal meat imports, Brexit has not changed anything. EU member states as well as the UK can now and always could impose border checks based on risk assessments and intelligence. What seems to have happened is that the level of criminal activity has increased. It has become more lucrative and easier to smuggle cheap, illegal meat products into the UK which get distributed to small shops and individuals via an established criminal network. 

For legal meat imports, when the FMD case was announced, all imports of meat from Germany could and should have been stopped immediately. It actually took several days. There should also have been a blanket ban on individual travellers bringing any amount of meat or dairy into the UK, which poses just as big a risk to biosecurity as illegal imports. A blanket ban would be much simpler to follow and would have removed the requirement for individuals to work out the complicated temporary restrictions that were put in place. Disinfectant mats should also have been placed at all ports of entry for foot passengers and vehicles.

The other angle to this is traceability. The reason FMD spread so widely and quickly in 2001 was that animal movements continued for several days after the first case was reported but there was no real-time digital system to track where they went. If you look at a visual ‘map’ of where all those animals went, it resembles a starburst fanning out from each livestock auction. 

We now have a system and the tools needed to be able to quickly shut down animal movements within the UK should FMD reach our shores. It’s called the Livestock Information Service. However, its use isn’t mandatory and, furthermore, movements only get notified AFTER an animal movement has taken place. In other countries movement licenses must be applied for BEFORE animals are moved from one farm to another or through the livestock auctions, which makes it much easier for the authorities to control the spread of disease.

We need government to make the use of this existing traceability system mandatory for cattle and sheep and for licenses to be applied for in advance. Without that the UK has no ability to lock down animal movements the minute a notifiable disease is discovered.