The extended Euregio of The Netherlands, NorthRhine Westphalia (NordRhein-Westfalen, NRW) and Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen, NDS) is a highly entangled area, particularly with regard to the production and consumption of livestock commodities. Both production and consumption have a large cross-border importance, which is expected to increase further in the near future. As a consequence, a mutual cross-border interdependency exists with respect to the prevention, monitoring and control of highly contagious livestock diseases, both in normal (peace time) conditions (i.e. free of diseases such as Avian Influenza (AI)) and in crisis situations (i.e. during cases of outbreaks of highly contagious diseases). Due to this interdependency, both NL and NRW-NDS experience major epidemiological and economic consequences in case of an outbreak in either one or both countries.
From the viewpoint of policy makers two problems are important. (1) Since veterinary routine measures are costly instruments, mitigating the costs of these measures would be an option. However, there is a trade-off between mitigating the costs of these routine measures and possibly increased veterinary risks on introduction and/or spread of highly contagious diseases. (2) Since highly contagious diseases result in major financial-economic consequences, mitigation of this impact would be an option by making use of the potential of the joint region NL, NRW and NDS.
However, determining a specific approach for cross-border livestock disease harmonization instead of implementing ad hoc initiatives is complex, both in routine and crisis situations. Therefore, the overall objective of this project is to provide a science-based policy paper for integrated control of highly contagious livestock diseases, focused on several (more or less integrated) quantitatively based, future-oriented scenarios (time horizon: year 2020) to mitigate the financial-economic costs and consequences of disease control resulting from the frontiers. These scenarios will provide a basis for future cross-border policy and decision making, particularly for the three states involved. |
