Yesterday was the second anniversary of the devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. Here Douglas Chalmers, regional director of the Country Land and Business Association North-West/North-East, gives his thoughts:

FEBRUARY 20 saw the second anniversary of the first case in the worst-ever outbreak of foot-and mouth-disease in the world.

The scars from that outbreak remain today - visible across some still-understocked landscapes; visible in the effects on many businesses; or hidden as individuals, families and communities are still coming to terms with the effects of those terrible times.

We can only hope lessons have been learned from the much-vaunted, but non-public, inquiries, yet I am not at all confident. Should the worst happen and we have to go through it again, I believe that we are not much better prepared than we were two years ago.

The media will no doubt produce retrospective features. I would encourage you to ask Government to show the farming community that effective contingency plans are in place and will be communicated to all parties concerned; that proper import controls are now applied so that neither this nor any virus can be brought into the country with food of unknown provenance and quality assurance, and that the money allocated to rural regeneration be spent quickly, effectively and with the minimum lost in administration.

Agricultural colleges report that they are struggling to find students willing to take on farming as a career. Meanwhile, the average age of our existing farmers continues to increase.

Let this be an early warning that, unless we are prepared to recognise the importance of our food industry and its many spin-off benefits, it will cease to exist.

One day, we will wake up to realise that with no-one to produce our own food, we have come to rely on the rest of the world to supply our basic needs, to their standards, and on their terms. That is a situation that must not be allowed to happen