The clearest indication for me
that the government is about to change tack on its response to mycoplasma bovis
came not from the horrifying map projecting the forward trace of the disease,
but from Damien O’Connor’s scathing indictment of farmers in the media and how
well his comments played with the public.
The disease and attempts to
eradicate it were, he admitted, a disaster. On top of the 38 infected farms
there are about 70 more that are likely to be affected, 300-odd that are under
investigation and another 1700 that are of interest.
70 percent of farmers were not
tracing cattle properly through NAIT, he said, and a black market trade in
livestock was also hampering efforts to trace animal movements. The reaction on
social media was immediate: the bloody
farmers had brought this upon themselves and why should the taxpayer be in the
gun for $1b to help bail them out?
This gives the government a
position from which they can impose a higher share of the costs than agreed to previously
and the ability to back away from an eradication program.
The fact of course is 100% NAIT
compliance wouldn’t have halted the spread of the disease, but it would have
given us a clearer picture much sooner. MPI now believe M. Bovis has been in
the country since 2015 and perhaps even earlier, and the bulk of the farms
being inspected received animals well before the disease was even known to be
in New Zealand.
A bull calf born in 2015 may well
have gone to a calf rearer disease-free, but if that rearer had bought milk
from an infected herd then all bets are off. That newly infected calf could
well have been used to mate heifers in 2016 and then again to tail off a
different dairy herd in 2017 before heading off to the works undiagnosed,
leaving a trail of infected animals in its wake.
We need to develop a quick and
effective test for M.Bovis and I predict we’ll then move to system much like we
use to control Tb: test, contain and control.
Michelle Edge, Chief Executive of
NAIT, recently defended the NAIT as being “philosophically well designed”. By
this she meant the system has got 4 things right; you need to tag animals,
register animals, register properties and register movements. Where it falls
down though is when people actually have to interact with it: a recent survey
by a rural publication found over 80 percent of farmers hate NAIT with the
burning intensity of a thousand suns.
The M.Bovis genie is well and
truly out of the bottle and I can only hope we as an industry have learned our
lesson about the importance of traceability. The system we have may be a
clunker, but we’ve got to make the effort to ensure it works as best it can.
