Damage politicians have done to food producers is disgraceful - Yorkshire Post Letters

IT is now the 25th anniversary of when British beef was banned worldwide which cost my family, along with hundreds of others, tens of thousands of pounds and which was totally unfounded.

It is 25 years since, which most people will now have forgotten, the Government of the day destroyed millions of tonnes of meat, with a third of the world population starving or under nourished, because they declared the New Variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (vCJD) was caused by eating British beef.

I knew at the time after speaking to various scientists that this was totally wrong.

In fact I personally met the Minister of Agriculture at the time, Douglas Hogg, and wrote to many so called powers that be but unfortunately without success of getting any changes.

The late Professor Richard Lacey of Leeds University went on the TV on numerous occasions, stating there will be hundreds of thousands of people dying from vCJD by eating British Beef and he was allowed to do so.

There were actually 74 at the time.

I have recently investigated as to how many people have actually passed away during the last 25 years with vCJD which is 178.

Someone in the Government got it massively wrong along with our so called European partners, or, I ask myself, was it intentional?

In 2001, the farming industry was again decimated by foot and mouth disease with the Government slaughtering millions of animals, ruining and destroying many family farms both financially and healthwise and, at the same time, completely losing control of the situation at the time.

I ask again what went wrong again and could it possibly have been avoided?

The damage successive governments have done, and are still doing, to the food producers of this country is, in my opinion, disgraceful.

Paying farmers to now grow trees, bees, butterflies and buttercups, with food production seemingly way down the Government’s list of priorities is again, in my opinion, a huge mistake as it won’t fill the bellies of our children in years to come.

The Government, in its wisdom, has decimated our fishing industry and I suspect, for whatever reason, it is trying, and have been since the early 1990s, to achieve this with our farming industry.

As a previous food producer and farmer, it worries me greatly as to what is happening to this island of ours with the people who are running it.