BY ANNE HOWIE
MANCHESTER, England - Reactionary protests, mostly by family beef farmers, erupted here in early December. Hundreds of farmers at Holyhead port on Anglesey, Wales, threw 40 tons of beefburgers imported from Ireland into the sea at 1:00 a.m. on December 1.

Over the next few days, the pickets spread to ports throughout Scotland, England, and Wales attempting to block imports of beef from Ireland, and on the southern coast of England, against imports from France. At Stranraer in Scotland, for example, farmers stopped around 20 lorries from Ireland from entering the country.

While the protests appeared to take the heads of farmers' organizations by surprise, their political thrust was in line with the protectionist perspective of the National Farmers Union (NFU) and its counterparts in Scotland and Wales, which are dominated by big capitalist farmers.

Jim Walker, a beef and sheep farmer from Dumfriesshire who was taking part in blockades of the port of Stranraer, said, "It is disgraceful that the government is allowing imports on such a large scale into this country when British farmers are facing bankruptcy. Nobody else had to endure the strict controls we do to make British beef the safest and best." One poster produced for a protest in Abergavenny, Wales, read, "I thought we won the war."

By the following week the NFU was well in control, launching a nationwide 150,000 (US$1=1.60) advertising campaign to urge consumers to "Buy British" and promoting a petition calling on the government to "give Britain's farmers and growers a fair deal and a level playing field in Europe."

The farmers' actions are rooted in the deepest farming crisis in living memory. Newly released government statistics show that total income from farming has dropped by 37 per cent in the last year, but the true picture is worse. According to the NFU, the more widely used gauge of average farm income for a farmer and spouse has dropped 47 percent in the last year. As a result, many family farmers have either already lost their farms or face the prospect of doing so this winter. Jason Brooks, who owns a small farm on the island of Anglesey, off the Welsh coast, told Militant reporters he works a minimum of 60 hours a week as an agricultural laborer in order to maintain his own farm. He said nearly all family farmers in the area are in the same position.

One factor that has precipitated the immediate beef crisis is the BSE fiasco. Since March 1996, when a link between Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow disease") and a new strain in humans, Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD), was admitted, cattle older than 30 months cannot be sold for beef but must be incinerated.

The farmer receives compensation of only around 340 - and next year will receive nothing. In addition, cattle that have given birth cannot be sold for beef, and all dairy animals are incinerated. Each beef animal has a "passport" stating its parentage, as well as its vaccination and ownership history.

The government announced a ban on the sale of all cuts of beef on the bone December 3 in the wake of evidence showing that the agent that causes BSE and CJD could be transmitted through the spinal column and bone marrow of cattle.

All beef exports from Britain have been banned by the European Union (EU) since March 1996. For farmers here, one of the consequences of this situation has been the increased ability of supermarkets to push down the price the farmers get for their cattle. For this reason, farmers also organized pickets of supermarkets, highlighting the difference in price paid to farmers and the price workers must pay for beef.

These protests, however, have taken on a protectionist character, with farmers opposing the sale of imported beef.

Since the outbreak of the protests, the British government has pointed to the European Union ban as the source of the problem. On December 15, Minister of Agriculture John Cunningham announced a unilateral ban on any EU meat imports that did not conform to the measures applied in the name of food hygiene in the United Kingdom. The ports pickets were called off in Scotland on December 9, and at other ports over the next few days, in favor of lobbying led by the farmers organizations.

The capitalist crisis facing small farmers, continues, however. The Independent reported that Cunningham, speaking on the future of the beef industry in the United Kingdom, "warned farmers that they should plan on the basis that major changes were coming. There would be fewer farmers, but consumers, the beef industry and the environment would all benefit in the long term."  
 
 
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