LITTLE appeared to have been done to prevent foot-and-mouth entering the country again, said the NFU this week in a damning report on the government's handling of the world's worst outbreak.

The NFU blamed the crisis on a catalogue of failures, from import controls and contingency planning to communications.

Mr Ben Gill, NFU president, said the lessons of the 1967 outbreak were very clearly ignored in 2001.

"The government was ill-prepared, overwhelmed and, too often, incompetent," he said. "This time they must listen."

The report, Lessons to be Learned, was based on the NFU's own experiences of dealing with government and scientists, and on first-hand experiences of farmers and local NFU staff.

Criticisms include:

Import controls. - "These are inadequate and - worse - there are no clear signs of any improvement."

Control strategy. - "Resources were poorly co-ordinated and were quickly overwhelmed, leading to a rapid spread of the epidemic.

"There was a failure to widely apply successful bio-security schemes. The contiguous cull, while necessary, was applied too rigidly. There was a failure to communicate clearly on vaccination, compounded by a lack of scientific research."

Movement controls. - "There was inadequate resourcing and preparation of licensing systems and an unclear basis for balancing disease control and commercial needs."

Cleaning and disinfection. - "There was a lack of proper control from the centre and repeated delays and mistakes in issuing contracts."

Contingency planning. - "This failed to involve all the major stakeholders and had not been properly tested or updated. There was, for example, inadequate planning for disposal of slaughtered animals and for animal welfare problems."

The report lists 28 recommendations, calling for:

l improved import controls;

l better contingency planning, organisation and logistics;

l further scientific research to ensure more flexible control strategies;

l communication failures within government and with the industry to be addressed;

l a clearer, fairer and more efficient system of valuation and compensation.

"It is hard to overstate the profound sense of waste and loss - emotional as well as financial - that farmers feel about this whole appalling episode," said Mr Gill. "But their hurt has been compounded by a catalogue of delays, failures, incompetence and inadequacies."

He said that for many, on top of the pressures they were already facing, foot-and-mouth would end their farming lives.

"We owe it to these people in particular, and to the livestock industry, the wider farming community and society in general, to ensure that the lessons of this horrendous episode are learned and acted on with a degree of urgency that has been lacking in recent months," said Mr Gill.

l On Tuesday, Mr Gill told a London summit that foot-and-mouth had been the latest and most devastating unwanted import from a growing list in recent years.

"We have to make sure our border controls are tough enough to cope with the risk posed by increasing international trade and travel," he said.

The NFU was host to the summit, which involved a dozen organisations and explored ways of reducing the risks from imported animal and plant diseases.

Imported diseases in recent years have included classical swine fever, potato brown rot, wheat mozaic virus, leaf wilt, rhizomania and Dutch elm disease.