Thin ice will crack as production grows

JUST to encourage those of you who are unhappy about the prospect of chlorine-rich chicken being imported from the US under some shady deal cooked up by British ministers, let me inform you of a product recall that was ordered in America last week.

The red flag was raised about consignments of frozen chicken portions that had been sent out from a processing plant after people who had eaten some of them went down with listeria.

But it’s the volume of product that is the relevant point: the processors were trying to claw back no less than 4,200 tons of the stuff – and if you are finding it difficult to visualise how much meat that is, it’s the equivalent of 700 elephants. Still confused? Imagine them all lined up in double file: they would stretch from Chepstow roundabout to the southern end of the Severn Bridge. A classic example, in other words, of the disbenefits of scaling up food production – the process we are constantly being told will guide us all to the promised land of prosperity.

The point being that while you may be able to enhance profits the bigger you become the thinner the ice you are skating on, and the more catastrophic the outcome when it finally cracks.

We have already seen it happen here many times, notably in poultry production where companies have been unable to keep on top of exponentially expanding welfare issues, with some appalling results.

The focus is currently on the Davidstow creamery in North Cornwall, formerly one of the showpiece centres in the Dairy Crest portfolio but now in the hands of Canadian multinational Saputo, the world’s largest cheese maker – held up everywhere as an example of how bigger is inevitably better.

Not, it seems as far as the 500 families living in Davidstow are concerned, because their community is being regularly treated to blasts of hydrogen sulphide coming off the factory’s waste treatment plant.

When Davidstow was in the hands of Dairy Crest it was always immaculately maintained but under the new management maintenance is clearly being cut back – to judge from the appearance of the buildings – while the waste treatment plant is being regularly overwhelmed, leading to build-ups of stagnant waste injecting the healthy fumes of rotten eggs into the bracing north Cornish air.

The local council is furious and even the Environment Agency is mildly upset – though it’s a certain bet that any action it does decide to take will be disproportionately mild compared with the vigour with which it would come down on an individual farmer who was causing a similar nuisance.

There’s another side to Davidstow, too. Cornish farmers supplying the plant have been urged to scale up production in order to maximise the meagre returns it pays with the result that the county is now home to 2,000-head herds.

But Cornwall is not the place to be farming on that scale because of the massive volumes of slurry that are generated: you don’t have to drive very far in any direction in Cornwall before you come to the edge and what with that and the protected areas such as Bodmin Moor your disposal options are, to say the least, limited.

None of this of course, registers with the C division ministers who are now busily signing international trade deals which will leave UK consumers at the mercy of some of the most gargantuan industrial-scale food companies in the world whose goods – as George Eustice himself has recently admitted – it will be impossible for the UK Government to monitor to any degree for sustainability, animal welfare, or adverse environmental impact.

So who will be doing the job? Simple, said George, the supermarkets.

So that’s all right then. The supermarkets who have been caught telling us that their intensively reared chicken is free-range and whose ‘beef ’ burgers have been round Aintree a couple of times can obviously be trusted to act in the best interests of all British consumers.

Nothing to worry about, in other words.