Farm families still feel the aftershocks of BSE five years after it was discovered in Canada.
Researchers in a study at the University of Calgary community health sciences department have been talking with farmers for the last year about the social and economic reverberations of the fatal disease first found in an Alberta cow in 2003.
The result was loss of trade, reduced incomes and uncertainty for the farm community.
Led by Wilfreda Thurston, the study aimed to put a human face on the economic tragedy of BSE.
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Researchers are poring over more than 270 responses from 176 farms and 141 communities across Canada to open-ended questions, as well as in-depth personal interviews.
The study was funded by PrioNet Canada, which supports research into prion diseases such as BSE, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and chronic wasting disease in deer and elk.
PrioNet Canada funded the research for one year but declined to continue, stating the BSE crisis was over because trade had resumed. Thurston argued funding should continue for another year because long-term impacts linger and continue to affect rural families’ well-being. She has applied to the U of C faculty of veterinary medicine for additional funding.
Several themes have already emerged from what Thurston calls a crisis in slow motion.
“There definitely was a theme of diminished trust in the government to communicate and to protect the industry,” she said.
What also become obvious to her was the heavier burden farmers had to carry.
“One of themes that I derived out of that was their subsidization of the Canadian food supply because prices didn’t go up for the consumer. So here they are cashing in Registered Retirement Savings Plans to keep the farm going and the consumer isn’t (experiencing) any impact. That is a form of subsidization,” she said.
Farmers were asked about their coping strategies to survive and what choices they had to make. Farmers saw their debt load increase and many had to find jobs, sell land or delay retirement as they dipped into savings accounts.
Stress was a recurring issue for individuals, families and communities. Their physical and mental health problems are still being evaluated, but the situation also hurt small rural towns.
“There were lots of small businesses in small towns that supported the industry and there was fewer opportunities for people to take part in things like community events and to do volunteering, and that is a stress on the community,” Thurston said.
She also found people marked events in their lives by whether it was before or after BSE. Most said they remembered what they were doing the day of the announcement that came at a time of lingering drought and higher costs.
In hindsight, some said that if they knew this was coming, they might have left the cattle industry before it happened.
Thurston wants to present the findings to federal and provincial departments of agriculture to help them with their approach to risk management and agriculture policy, as well as rural public health. She also hopes policy makers realize this crisis further contributes to rural depopulation and loss of farmers.
“The resounding prediction that we are going to lose rural communities is not new, but it is coming from the people on the ground and it is supported by Statistics Canada reports on the number of farms we have.”
She also hopes governments appreciate that policy changes add to the workload and costs for farmers responsible for implementing the new practices of identification and record keeping.
While they are committed to producing safe food, farm families find themselves unable to afford university tuitions, vacations or community activities because of losses directly connected to BSE and the follow-up regulations to prevent its spread.
