Army gave waste food to farm at centre of disaster outbreak

The Army supplied waste food to the pig farm at the centre of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, the Ministry of Defence confirmed tonight.

Slops from the kitchen at Whitburn Training Camp, near Sunderland, were fed to pigs at Bobby and Ronnie Waugh’s farm in Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland, a spokesman said.

But all food provided by caterers at the camp conformed to British and European rules that ban imports from areas hit by the disease, he added.

A Chinese restaurant which provided waste food to the brothers was originally suggested as the source of the outbreak that had devastated rural areas.

Meat from Brazil and Uruguay - where foot-and-mouth disease is widespread - is used at Whitburn, The Sunday Telegraph claims.

And the brothers collect waste food from the camp 10 times a year for processing, under licence, into pig feed, the paper says.

The last collection was in December, two months before the disease was confirmed at the farm where vets believed it had already been present for several weeks, one of the brothers said.

However, the MoD said Whitburn was just one of a number of sources of waste food used by the brothers to feed their animals.

‘‘We have no reason to believe that any Ministry of Defence establishment is involved in this at all,’’ the MoD spokesman said.

‘‘The Waugh brothers collected their waste from a large number of non-MoD sources. We do not know if they the same strict controls.’’