MOSCOW, April 20 – The governor of Russia’s Novosibirsk region sacked a local agriculture minister on Monday for his handling of an outbreak of cattle illness that has led to mass culling in Siberia and sparked rare protests by farmers.
Governor Andrei Travnikov sacked Minister Andrei Shindelov, the local government’s Telegram channel said.
Novosibirsk farmers protested in March after police and vets culled thousands of animals in the region, fighting what they described as outbreaks of pasteurellosis – a severe bacterial pneumonia – and rabies. Many biology experts have said that neither of these diseases is commensurate with the culling.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agriculture Service in a report published last month cited “local sources and trading contacts” who alleged that “the scale of these measures may indicate an unconfirmed outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.”
The Russian agriculture watchdog agency told Reuters that allegations in the USDA report “were not true.”
(Reporting by Gleb Bryanski; editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
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