Time stands still for those caught in the eye of a storm. Eric Thornhill knows that sense of helplessness well, having lived through numerous farm disasters in his native England and on the farm he runs at Ile des Chenes, Man.
Over a period of 35 years, Thornhill and his family were threatened by a string of catastrophes that included outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease, scrapie and bovine spongiform encephalopathy.
In addition, widespread flooding in the early 1990s left his Manitoba farm under almost a metre of water.
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In each instance, watching his livelihood destroyed left Thornhill and his family economically damaged and emotionally devastated. Yet the 67-year-old farmer never felt defeated.
“Life goes on,” he said.
“You can live through a crisis (even though) it is devastating.”
For Thornhill, who still runs a farm with sheep, breeding horses and a riding stable, the ability to adapt and a tenacious attitude were key to his survival.
Professional crisis managers say those qualities will ultimately determine how many Canadian livestock producers survive the current BSE crisis.
Disaster management experts say the Canadian BSE crisis is a textbook example of how an entire industry can be devastated by a single event.
For producers and industry organizations, it also illustrated the importance of developing an effective crisis management strategy.
Ron Glaser, communications manager with the Alberta Beef Producers, said individual beef producers are coping as well as can be expected given the scope and duration of the crisis.
Financially, the losses caused by BSE are impossible to calculate but by many estimates, damage is valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
In 2002, Canada exported more than $3 billion worth of beef and cattle to the United States. The U.S. border has been closed to imports of live cattle and most beef products since May 20.
“For five months now it has almost solely been BSE that we have worked on and it’s hard to fathom that it could continue this long,” Glaser said.
“A lot of important work has been put on hold.”
From an organizational perspective, Canadian livestock groups and government agencies had a “fairly good” understanding of how BSE would affect markets and domestic production, Glaser said.
Not wanting to repeat the tragedy of BSE and foot-and-mouth disease in Europe, cattle producers had developed a crisis plan four years earlier.
That plan, combined with response procedures developed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, outlined what actions would be required to assure consumers, the media and trading partners that the positive diagnosis was an isolated incident and that Canadian beef was safe to eat.
Within three days of the BSE announcement, CFIA officials had placed 14 western Canadian farms under quarantine and were conducting tracebacks to determine the origin of the infected animal. Investigators were also tracking feed sources that may have been tainted by the contaminated carcass.
From a public relations perspective, producer groups did a good job of convincing the public there was no threat to human health, said Glaser.
As the country’s largest provincial beef organization, the ABP and other provincial organizations co-ordinated their public relations strategies and worked closely with the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association to ensure a unified message was reaching consumers.
The Beef Information Centre handled national consumer issues among retailers and food service.
The Canada Beef Export Federation dealt with international issues and producers talked to their colleagues at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and Five Nations Beef Conference.
Within days of the announcement, an education campaign was launched with technical information sheets delivered to meat processors, health care professionals and 65,000 restaurants across Canada.
And a neurologist was contracted to handle technical calls regarding the risk to human health, since BSE has been connected to Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans.
That co-ordinated message succeeded beyond the industry’s expectations, said CCA communications manager Cindy McCreath.
In the wake of the announcement, Canadian consumers rallied around the industry and actually increased consumption of Canadian beef, she added.
That fact was borne out in figures from beef industry analyst Canfax, which reported a 53 percent increase in Canadian beef sales in July 2003 compared to July 2002, and a 40 percent increase in August.
Glaser and McCreath are also convinced the investment of time and money in beef promotion during the last two decades built a solid foundation of public confidence in beef safety and the Canadian food inspection system.
Communication among provincial beef organizations, government and agencies like the CFIA was critical to keeping the situation under control, but early on McCreath and Glaser realized their training in crisis management was not a perfect fit for the Canadian beef industry.
When a major corporation faces a crisis, a handful of designated spokespersons deliver carefully prepared messages.
“In Alberta there are 30,000 farmers who raise cattle and any one of them can have a camera put in their face and provide comments,” Glaser said.
Nonetheless, producers responded well to media inquiries and the grassroots interviews seemed to build public support because they put a human face on an economic disaster, he said.
Cattle producers were not the only ones who found themselves in the eye of the storm.
The CFIA fielded hundreds of questions about how a disease like BSE could have surfaced in Canada.
Like their colleagues in the livestock industry, CFIA personnel were trained to handle a crisis, but they soon learned reality is unpredictable.
“Communication tends to break down almost catastrophically when a big emergency hits,” said CFIA spokesperson Mark Van Dousen.
Information never comes quickly enough to satisfy everyone in a less than perfect situation, he said.
At his Ottawa office, Van Dousen’s first 24 hours after the announcement were coloured by confusion and a lack of information as CFIA officials scrambled to answer hundreds of phone calls.
“We did react immediately. We knew it was going to be big. Nobody had to be convinced of the significance.”
Van Dousen described the situation as exhilarating for his office because it put his staff’s knowledge and plans to the test. Handling this situation could make the next crisis easier to manage.
As the industry recovers, analysis continues on how the crisis was approached and where improvements are needed.
“Stepping forward a few years and looking back, we can say we moved through incredibly quick compared to what anybody else has done,” said Ted Haney, manager of the beef export federation.
“There will also be key lessons for industry and government on how to better prepare ourselves in the event of major emergencies,” he said.
