Yesterday, Agriculture Minister Maria Panayiotou passed through parliament with a suitcase stuffed with measures, figures, doses, action plans, and coordination frameworks. Anyone listening without prior knowledge might have concluded that the state had been running at full throttle for months — that when foot-and-mouth disease came knocking, it found a machine humming with Swiss-watch precision.
The reality, however, is somewhat different. More precisely: it operates at a rather different speed. Because foot-and-mouth disease did not materialise out of thin air one fine morning and catch us sleeping. The disease appeared in the occupied territories last December.
When a highly contagious illness surfaces a few kilometres away, the logical response is for the state to sound the alarm immediately. To get ahead of it — rather than spend the next several months chasing it. But it seems the Agriculture Ministry operates by a different logic: first, wait for the crisis; then, begin mobilising.
So here we are. Yesterday, the minister announced that 600,000 vaccine doses have been secured, of which 238,000 have already been administered — 159,000 to sheep and goats, 79,000 to cattle. She informed us that compensation for loss of income is being processed. That disease-free zones are being sought for restocking livestock. That 16 agencies and over 500 officials are working around the clock. That €700,000 has been spent on 99 mobile footbaths and 27 automated disinfection systems.
Wow. Quite the list. Genuinely impressive. I was so swept up that I nearly abandoned my desk and rushed to parliament to find Maria and bowed. I just about managed to contain myself — at which point I remembered the small problem: all of this has the distinct flavour of a fire brigade arriving after the forest has burned to the ground.
Because when an epidemic moves at the speed of a virus that spreads like wildfire, the state cannot respond at the pace of a government department processing paperwork. To put it plainly: foot-and-mouth is driving a Ferrari, and the Ministry is giving chase on a moped.
And naturally, amid all this furious activity, there was the obligatory reference to dialogue with the European Commission. According to the minister, both she and the President are in continuous contact with Brussels, seeking an exemption from mass culling of asymptomatic animals — on account of Cyprus’s particular circumstances as an island state.
All well and good. All perfectly reasonable. But the fundamental question remains unanswered: if all this urgency exists today, why didn’t it exist in December? Why wasn’t there the same pace then? The same vigilance? Why weren’t measures activated the moment the disease appeared on our doorstep? In politics, there is one iron rule: when you’re chasing a crisis instead of preventing it, you’ve already lost the first round.
Of course, buried within this sorry episode there is also a dose of — shall we say — geopolitical luck. Because just as Maria Panayiotou was coming under fire for her handling of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, the international news agenda decided to change channels.
The war in Iran, the tensions across the Middle East, the sweeping geopolitical upheaval — all of it swallowed the domestic noise in an instant. The political storm began to blow itself out.
If the minister has any grace about her, she ought to send a thank-you card to Donald Trump. Not because he solved Cyprus’s foot-and-mouth problem — that would be a stretch, even by the standards of international politics. But because global crises have a peculiar talent: they make the smaller ones disappear off the radar entirely.
And that, perhaps, is the real problem. Not that measures are being taken — they should be. Not that agencies are finally mobilising, because they are finally mobilising. The problem is that in Cyprus we have grown thoroughly accustomed to a state that operates after the fact.
The crisis hits, the system stirs, the agencies scramble, the ministers brandish their statistics, and the government declares that it will “leave no one behind.” Except that by then, the virus has already done a full lap of the island. And however hard you push the accelerator at that point, the Ferrari has long since vanished over the horizon — leaving the moped to eat its dust.
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