Livestock disease control in frontier regions: problems and prospects, challenges and limitations for cross-border collaboration

Frontier regions have specific features that make them more vulnerable for introduction and spread of livestock diseases compared to ‘backland areas’, e.g. more intensive livestock trade and transport. This holds for traditional diseases such as Classical Swine Fever (CSF), but even more for vector-borne Emerging Infectious Diseases such as Blue Tongue. On the other hand, the cross-border inter-dependency offers quite some possibilities for collaboration and mitigation of particularly the economic impact of livestock diseases. Currently these possibilities are not fully recognized and hence under-utilized. This paper aims to review the development of cross-border collaboration in livestock disease control from two perspectives: (1) specific veterinary aspects; and (2) mitigation of economic impacts. Specific attention will be given to the following issues: (1) communication and data exchange; (2) capacity building; (3) routine versus crisis time measures and practices; (4) collaboration in prevention and control; (5) cross-border exercises; and (6) harmonization of disease control. The frontier region Germany-Netherlands is a very prominent example of cross-border economic inter-dependency and veterinary risks, and steps towards harmonization have been taken in the last decade. Therefore, particularly examples from this area will be presented and put in a wider perspective. One such an example shows the contradictory effect that might occur: cross-border harmonization of CSF can reduce the overall impact, however, because of differences in institutional aspects (i.e. compensation schemes), for some German stakeholders the impact can increase. This emphasizes the need for an integrated beyond-veterinary approach. It is concluded that in frontier regions specific veterinary and economic risks can be mitigated provided an integrated veterinary-economic approach.