Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Food shortages but PM OK with 100,000 porkers being binned due to lack of abattoir workers
BORIS Johnson has flippantly brushed aside fears of a mass pig cull as food shortages continue and families go hungry on his watch.
Farmers warn up to 100,000 pigs may have to be shot and dumped in skips rather than turned into food due to a chronic shortage of workers including abattoir staff, lorry drivers and butchers.
Yet despite the huge waste of precious Uk-reared food, the Prime Minister dismissed what critics say is a totally avoidable cull – and even appeared to make light of the situation.
Asked whether he should have done more to prevent the labour shortage, he answered as if the question was about the morality of killing farm animals rather than the workers crisis.
He told an interviewer on Times Radio: “That is what happens to pigs in this country. I’m afraid they’re eaten very often in this country.
“I don’t know, do you have a bacon sandwich? That is what happens.”
Pig farmers have been protesting outside the Tory conference in Manchester over the staffing crisis.
Meryl Ward, who runs a family farm in Lincolnshire, said: “We have people in this country who are going to foodbanks, who can’t afford to pay for food, who don’t have enough food – and then we’re going to throw perfectly good food in the bin. I don’t understand that.
“I don’t understand why a government would allow that to happen.” Ms Ward
slammed what she called the “madness” for not introducing Covid recovery visas to address labour shortages.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that shops were “now being filled by foreign-imported pork that doesn’t meet our welfare standards”.
It came as pig farmer Robert Shepherd said he was closing his business after over 50 years due to the staffing crisis.
Mr Shepherd, 58, usually sends 400 pigs a week to market, but now faces culling 10,000 of them in the coming weeks as they back up at his 2,000-acre farm in Damerham, Hants.
He said the worker shortage was the final straw following the pressure put on his business due to Covid.
Although too late for him, Mr Shepherd said it was crucial that temporary visas were issued to foreign labour to buy time while British workers were properly trained up, a process that can take as long as 18 months. He said drastic action is required to “prevent an apocalypse” in the industry.
He added: “With all the pressures we’ve faced in the last 12 months we’ve got to a crisis point now.
“Covid started it and it has been exacerbated since they lifted the travel ban [so foreign workers could return home].
“We thought things would improve in the autumn but there is a huge lack of staff from foreign labour in the abattoirs.
“Unless something is done soon by the Government and they actually pull their finger out and get serious, many farms across the country will have to kill and burn their own pigs.”
At least 600 healthy pigs have already been culled, according to the National Pig Association.
The trade body said that the cull was “hugely difficult” for pig farmers and their workers who have invested so much time and effort in rearing their pigs, and they were having to bring in outsiders to carry it out. An NPA spokesman added: “Some are having to use knackermen as they just can’t bear having to do it or ask their staff to do it.”
We have people going to foodbanks, and then we have to bin perfectly good food MERYL WARD WHO RUNS A FAMILY FARM IN LINCOLNSHIRE
@Grahamhiscott