/REPEAT/DEVELOPMENT-MERCOSUR: Foot-and-Mouth Vanquishes Borders and Armies

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 8 2001 (IPS) - Brazil began massive vaccinations of its cattle against foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) Monday along its southern borders, where an outbreak of the livestock ailment indicates that the measure comes too late and that, once again, officials have underestimated the proliferation capacity of the virus.

Military control over the borders did not prevent Brazilian cattle from becoming infected, probably from nearby FMD outbreaks recently detected in Argentina and Uruguay.

Eleven animals presented FMD symptoms last Saturday in Santana do Livramento on a ranch just two kilometres from the Uruguayan border.

It was predictable and “we had been warning about that risk,” two technicians of the Rio Grande do Sul state government told IPS. Health teams will vaccinate 4.1 million head of cattle in 25 municipalities along the southern Brazilian border as a preventive “health cordon.”

“The virus is spread by the wind, by birds and wild animals – not even soldiers lined up shoulder to shoulder would be able to contain it,” explained Maria de Fátima Brandalise, assistant director of the livestock division at the state’s Agricultural Secretariat.

A suspension of vaccination efforts will only be viable once the foot-and-mouth virus, which affects cloven-hooved animals – is eradicated around the world, she stated.

This notion seems to be confirmed by recent events in Great Britain, where the epidemic has spread to some areas of continental Western Europe, and now throughout Mercosur (Southern Common Market), pointed out Gilberto Fernandes, a veterinarian specialising in livestock health in Rio Grande do Sul’s ‘gaucho’ interior.

The two technicians are currently in Santana do Livramento coordinating the campaign to prevent the expansion of the outbreak. They attribute the delay in providing vaccinations, which the state government and ranchers had been demanding for the last several months, to an “assessment error” by the national Ministry of Agriculture.

The central government hoped in May to obtain certification for southern Brazil as an FMD-free area without vaccination, a status determined by the Paris-based International Epizootics Organisation (OIE) and which would open the way to export the region’s beef and dairy products to the best international markets.

As a result, Brasilia did not agree to vaccinate the cattle in the southern state until the outbreaks in Argentina and Uruguay were within just a few kilometres of the border, making the measure inevitable. FMD is threatening the economies of all four Mercosur countries: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The OIE rules must be changed because they encourage the rejection of vaccinations as entrepreneurs are tempted by greater trade revenues from non-vaccinated animals, Brandalise said.

There is no reason to reject the meat or other products from vaccinated animals, Fernandes commented, but wealthy countries use foot-and-mouth as a health-related trade barrier against lower- cost beef from Brazil and other developing countries.

“Even if we eliminate this problem, the obstacle would then be tuberculosis, brucelosis or some other pretext” wielded by the industrialised nations against imports from the developing South, he added.

This scenario means an ongoing conflict between technical opinion and the Ministry of Agriculture’s decisions, which are taken based on commercial interests, especially in this country, where exports must rise in order to even out the trade balance.

Last August, an FMD outbreak in Joia, some 300 km north of Santana do Livramento, was contained by a slaughter of 11,000 animals, a measure decreed by the ministry, said Brandalise.

Joia, a municipality of more than 7,000 people, with two-thirds living in the countryside, suffered an “economic reversal of 10 or 15 years,” calculates Fernandes, who had observed the containment process there.

The ban on shipping animal and vegetable products at that time – in order to prevent the spread of the disease – “paralysed the local agriculture-based economy” and caused “serious emotional harm,” requiring psychological assistance for many of the farming families involved, he said.

Most of the people who suffer the economic impacts of this livestock disease are small farmers who own just a few head of cattle and even name them, “as if they were members of the family,” said the veterinarian, recalling the case of a boy who asked to bottle-feed his little goat before taking it to be slaughtered.

But this time, Agriculture Minister Marcus Pratini de Moraes accepted the proposal of the Rio Grande do Sul government to vaccinate, not eliminate, the animals suspected of being infected with the FMD virus.

The southern state’s own Agricultural Secretary, José Hoffmann, said that his government would not agree to sacrificing “even one more animal,” arguing that compulsory slaughter is “a commercial, not a technical, requirement.”

He also blamed the national ministry for the spread of FMD to southern Brazil because it had impeded vaccination even after receiving reports that the virus had been detected very close to the border in neighbouring countries.

The problem returned to the southern half of South America due to a relaxation of border controls and cuts in investment in prevention measures over the last few years, following relative success in fighting the disease, said Eduardo Correa Melo, head of the Pan-American FMD Centre, at a continental conference in Sao Paulo last week.

In South America, 67.5 percent of the cattle lived in FMD-free areas in July 2000, but the percentage has now dropped to 50.5 percent as a result of the outbreaks in the Mercosur countries, according to the Centre’s data.