Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
Driving north, we saw the smoke rising two or three hundred metres from the road: and silhouetted against the morning light, we realised that we were seeing the carcass of a cow hanging by the legs from a tractor hook being added to a large smoking pyre.
It was 25 years ago yet the horrendous image remains seared in our memories. While the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) crisis is often remembered as a domestic British disaster, it was towards the end of a decade-long global wave. Genetic tracing by the World Reference Laboratory for FMD (WRLFMD) confirmed that the PanAsia strain (a lineage of serotype O) was first identified in northern India in 1990. The strain spread more effectively across cattle, pigs and sheep than previous strains. It reached Saudi Arabia in 1994, Turkey and the Balkans 1996 and by 2000 had moved into China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea as well as South Africa.
The UK outbreak began in February 2001 at a pig farm and DNA sequencing showed the virus was a 99.7% match to the strain found in South Africa a few months earlier. It is widely believed the virus entered the UK via illegally imported meat used in “swill” (pig feed). It spread quickly and the treatment adopted was mass culling rather than vaccine. Mass culling of healthy animals on contiguous farms became a contentious element. Movement restrictions, disinfection protocols and bans on livestock markets and shows were also imposed in the hope of containing the spread.
FMD impact on leather
The impact for the leather trade was dramatic. About 6.5 million animals were slaughtered. The priority was for fast slaughter and rapid disposal via on-farm pyres, mass burial pits and rendering to halt the highly infectious virus. With carcasses being dealt with as hazardous waste, the domestic leather industry was effectively frozen.
The impact was severe over about 12 months after which the restocking of farms, the lifting of export bans and the normalisation of the supply chain for raw hides took only about another 12 months, although some price rises in certain global leather sectors resulted. A 2002 EU report was scathing and made it clear that, in future, “vaccination should be the first response.”
“It has become clear from the 2001 epidemic that mass culling on the scale seen in the UK and the Netherlands will not be publicly acceptable again and that alternative strategies are, therefore, essential.”
Bureaucratic delays were blamed for adding to the anguish of the farmers and an obsession with protecting agricultural export markets at all costs brought financial ruin to much of rural England. Tourism and animal welfare both suffered. Matters were complicated with concerns that burning or burying cattle carcasses could release Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or “Mad Cow Disease”, causing prions into the air or water supply thus inadvertently spreading the human form of BSE.
Biosecurity risks
But there were other global impacts that had been already building in the 1990s. These included an attack on chrome tanning, partly a consequence of the industry’s own determined push towards wet white spurred by European automotive recycling regulations and aggressive anti-leather sentiment started by PETA after a report on India in 1999 which pushed out aggressively against retailers in the early 2000s. All this with a simultaneous acceleration of the departure of tanning capacity to follow footwear manufacture out of the developed economies.
Smaller but significant were matters such as the closure of smaller rural abattoirs in the UK. Infected pigs had already passed through one facility before the start of the outbreak and their movements were shown to have been involved in the rapid spread of the virus. The crisis highlighted that the closure of many local, smaller abattoirs in previous years meant animals were being transported much longer distances to fewer, larger facilities.
But the rules put in places did not change this pattern of closure and consolidation and it has continued since with many of the later measures now looking as though they have done more harm than good. In 1970, Britain had 1,800 abattoirs but by 2001, it was down to 400, with the biggest restructuring during the 1996 BSE crisis. Additional 2018 rules in the UK on CCTV have helped reduce the UK down to approximately 50–60 small “red meat” abattoirs creating “slaughter deserts,” where farmers must drive animals for 4-6 hours. This now ironically has increased the biosecurity risks observed in the 2001 outbreak.
Most of the small rural abattoirs are now outside the normal collection system for hides. There have been definite benefits in traceability and some aspects of biosecurity, but the way they have been implemented has removed farmers’ access to their local slaughterhouse that provide local meat with few food miles, and the hides and skins have been lost to incineration, burial or rendering. These are all major problems today as farmers fight to support the rural economy and true circularity.
The price of U.S. cowhides soared
But even in 2001 the cull had its impact, as the LA Times noted in an article by Abigail Goldman in May 2001: “The price of U.S. cowhide is soaring and the cost of finished leather will soon follow, the first major repercussions here from Europe’s twin plagues of foot-and-mouth and “mad-cow” disease.” Lack of European hides and a panic with another outbreak in Argentina was pushing up leather prices. Low prices had created a huge demand for leather garments in 2000 and this was now reversing into alternate materials.
Ken Purdy of Prime Tanning was quoted as saying: “I’ve been in the business for 42 years, and I’ve never seen a supply shortage or anything even close to this. Somebody in the next six months’ time has to absorb these price increases. When most manufacturers go in to price their new lines, any cost increase will be in there, you can bet on that.”
By the end of 2001, Salz Leather based in Santa Cruz in California had closed and Prime Tanning had started to reduce their Berwick, Maine output more towards R&D for their overseas plants with further structural changes in 2002.
Before 2001, pig farmers collected waste from restaurants, school kitchens and hospitals, boiled it in large “swill baths” and feed it to their pigs. This process was considered environmentally friendly and cost-effective. The incredibly tough PanAsia strain of FMD meant that if a single piece of illegally imported, infected meat (like a cured ham or a scrap of beef) was dropped into a kitchen waste bin and wasn’t heated to a high enough temperature for long enough, the virus survived.
Consequently, the UK government implemented an emergency ban on all swill feeding. This was later made permanent across the entire European Union in 2002 (via Regulation (EC) No 1774/2002). This ban covered catering waste from restaurants or homes and included any meat-based products and non-meat products such as bread and vegetables if they had been in a kitchen that handled meat.
The soundbite that travelled furthest
This led immediately to a spike in the demand from the EU for soya meal, particularly for pig food, which in turn was blamed for a rise in Amazon deforestation. This meant that the data used in the influential report Livestock’s Long Shadow (FAO, 2006) was based on some of the highest ever years of forest destruction. It claimed the livestock sector was responsible for 18% of global anthropogenic GHG emissions, using a broad life‑cycle assessment that included feed, land‑use change and deforestation. It also argued that livestock should be treated as a major policy focus for land degradation, climate change, air/water pollution and biodiversity loss, not a marginal issue. This “18%” figure, and the comparison that livestock emissions exceeded those from transport, became the soundbite that travelled furthest. As we know, the data was erroneous and the figure downgraded to about half with other factors related to grassland carbon sequestration and biodiversity yet to be properly added in. But neither the leather industry nor the meat sector really reacted in time and the damage has been permanent.
But such events leave other marks. Most of all images of mass animal culling were widely disseminated, sparking debate about animal welfare. While not a direct economic impact, this contributed to a wider global awareness and discussion about animal disease control practices. Consumers were reminded of the origins of leather products and the impact of animal diseases on the industry, potentially influencing their purchasing decisions.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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