On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 14:30:57 +0100, Jane Ransom
wrote:

In article , martin
writes

and how would you have stopped the outbreak?

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh!!!!!!!
Do you remember what the outbreak was attributed to - I mean the really
rock bottom cause?

I wasn't sure I looked with google. According to the BBC (see separate
post)The outbreak was caused by a dishonest framer. The reason it
spread was the system of UK cattle marketing.

****PLEASE**** don't start me off on *that* one!!!

Isn't the problem that UK market prices are abysmal, because of the
monopoly positions of the main buyers - the supermarkets?

That's another one I don't want to be started off on (

It's better to say it.


It was called compensation AFAIR.

When you go to the supermarket and give the cashier some money for the
trolley full of goods you are going to take, do you call that
*compensating* the supermarket?

when somebody gives me handfuls of money decade after decade for
producing something nobody wants do you call that normal.


We live on an island: God help us if we ever have a
crisis which means we can't import food and we have no farmers left to
produce it.

You'll find that like in WWII output of the right stuff can quickly be
increased.

Only if we have people around who know *how* to grow it in the first
place. At the current rate that farmers are going bust or giving up, it
won't be long before we don't have any at all ((

The trend is for bigger and bigger farms, surprisingly, because of
communism and collectivisation, East Germany reached that point
decades ago, whilst West German and French farmers were still getting
subsidies for cultivating narrow strips of land that are the result of
the Napoleonic system inheritance.
Would you believe that 6 years ago the owner of a hotel that I know
in Bavaria was, and perhaps still is, getting EU agricultural
subsidies for maintaining a large unused wooden barn although all his
land was sold off years ago when the farmhouse was converted to a
hotel?
--
Martin