Caleb Bond: The risk foot and mouth disease poses to Australian agriculture is real. Are we too late?

No one wants to close the borders with Indonesia, but foot and mouth disease is a staggering risk, writes Caleb Bond. Is he right? Vote in our poll

We have known for months that foot and mouth disease was a major threat to Australia but precious little has been done.

Now we’re going to make people clean their shoes at the airport – but only because we’ve had a scare. This, at the very least, should have happened weeks ago.

Foot and mouth has now been detected at Adelaide Airport and in imported meat products in Melbourne.

It has begun entering the country and, I fear, it is a matter of when – not if – it spreads.

We’re not dealing with some abstract concept here. We’re talking about a disease, on Australia’s doorstep in Indonesia, that could grind our agricultural industry to a halt and cause $80bn of direct economic pain.

If an outbreak were to occur, a complete shutdown of farming would be highly likely to contain the spread of the disease.

If you thought a few days of shortages during the height of the pandemic was bad, then you haven’t seen anything yet.

Pork, beef, lamb – it would all have to stop. So too, potentially, would vegetable farming and construction.

Foot and Mouth can be carried through soil and, with a large population of feral pigs and deer in Australia, it could rapidly spread through the country.

Farm machinery would have to stop moving because it could have been in contact with contaminated soil.

On and on it goes.

All it takes is one person carrying the disease on their clothes to hop off a plane in Adelaide and drive home to the Adelaide Hills or the Riverland and it’s all over.

Food prices would go through the roof. The threat is real. And, yet, the federal government has seemingly been asleep at the wheel.

I don’t want to shut the border with Indonesia. But that may be our only option.

Mats sprayed with citric acid will eventually be rolled out at all international airports, but it should have happened yesterday.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said the government had not introduced chemical baths to clean footwear earlier because those chemicals were not safe for human contact.

Fair enough. But what did they do instead?

Make people take off their shoes and chuck them in the bin if we have to. It’s the least they can do to keep our meat industry safe after a nice overseas holiday.

There is serious anxiety among people in rural and regional Australia that foot and mouth disease is not far away and will destroy their livelihoods. The government has been giving them crickets.

No boozed-up Bali holiday is worth destroying Australia’s food industry.