With an announcement due on a trial culling of badgers to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis in cattle, Farming Editor Peter Hall looks at some of the implications.

Will they, won't they? Is a cull on the cards or not? Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman or possibly Farming Minister Jim Paice is expected to make a statement on the thorniest issue in English agriculture this week – but, there again, it may be later: "sometime before Christmas".

And while the chances are that the Government will allow a cull, albeit only a couple of trials in very limited hotspot areas – one in the South West – there is an outside chance it could at least hedge its bets and shelve it for the time being under pressure from the police, who have warned of activities by animal rights extremists and a shortage of manpower to cope with the situation, given policing cuts and the added demands of the Olympics next summer.

But if it cops out altogether it would face open rebellion from the coalition-supporting farming community.

As things stand, the last pronouncement on the subject by Mrs Spelman was that she was "minded" to allow a cull of all badgers in 70 per cent of those two pilot areas of 30 square kilometres. That must have been a decision made at Cabinet level.

But if she does give the go-ahead, the process will still be convoluted. The farming organisations, such as the TB Eradication Group, will give the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) a list of several potential hotspot areas for its vets and officers to choose the two. Licence applications for groups of farmers formed into companies to do the cull under vet supervision will take 15 weeks to process. Then the whole business will be challenged through the courts by the Badger Trust.

And by the time everything is sorted, it could well be the badger breeding season once again, when they may not be culled, and another year will have passed.

With 40,000 cattle destroyed because of bovine TB last year, will the cattle farming community find that scenario acceptable? Of course not.

It would all have been miles easier if the polymerase chain reaction test, supposed to identify badger setts containing infected animals, had actually worked efficiently. Taking out infectious animals suffering a long, lingering death from disease and starvation is one thing in the public psyche; shooting fit animals, previously protected by law, is something completely different, however necessary.

The Government and the English farming community have been watching closely developments in the Welsh Assembly, which cocked-up a badger cull last summer by failing to define boundaries, and thus left the whole process open to successful legal challenge.

The Welsh Assembly administration has changed since then and appointed an independent panel to review scientific evidence. A full statement on a potential cull will now be made in the early months of next year.

The Welsh Environment Minister, John Griffiths, had said previously that a decision could be expected before Christmas. Now the First Minister, Carwyn Jones, has announced the postponement, but he faced criticism over the delay.

Needless to say, the Badger Trust, implacably opposed to any cull, has welcomed it. The trust's chairman, David Williams, said: "This review must meet the Government's aspirations for the final decision to be science-led. It is important that ministers take time to consider carefully the independent panel's review of the science, without any further strident political interference.

"They should also consider the encouraging TB figures from the intensive action area of Pembrokeshire, which show the benefit of the stringent cattle-based controls now operating there. At the very least, this process must be allowed to run its course."

In England there has been a coming together of farmers and environmentalists, with the National Farmers' Union and the Badger Trust working together on trial areas with a badger-vaccination programme.

Admittedly those areas are in the Midlands, and are not TB hotspot sites – but if they are working together presumably they are talking and listening to one another, and establishing common ground and a degree of rapport.

A badger vaccine is clearly part of the answer to the problem – but only a part. A viable cattle vaccine is evidently a long way off perfection; that would be a real answer to the on-going rural catastrophe, but getting the EU (particularly the French) to accept imported vaccinated beef would be a hard slog. It would certainly not be high on David Cameron's agenda in the current EU negotiations.

Meanwhile cattle will go on being infected, livestock movements on infected farms severely restricted, and Westcountry cattle farmers by the score will wonder, yet again, if it is worth continuing to fight an uneven battle.