The galloping price of lamb
RUN a word association test and throw out ‘spring’, and ‘ lamb’ will probably be among the most frequent responses.
However, consumers heading for the butchers to acquire a joint of spring lamb for the Easter lunch table may well be in for a shock because prices have gone off the scale.
With lambs now making as much as £160 a head at auction, butchers are now having to charge prices at which – as one put it to me last week – it’s cheaper to eat gold.
He couldn’t do a leg for anything less than £55, he said – and even at that price he was barely making anything.
This can all be put down to a short market, a situation caused by a lot of farmers exercising foresight, taking the view that Brexit could throw the export business into turmoil (and how right they were) and cutting back on production.
On the other hand you could take the view that £55 is roughly the price a leg of lamb should be had prices kept up with the general rate of inflation. But as everyone knows farmgate prices are lagging 10 if not 20 years behind the times thanks to a range of factors including pressure from cheap meat imports and incessant supermarket price warring.
The £55 leg of lamb, therefore, is nothing more than a taste of reality.
But while British lamb producers are enjoying something of a bonanza, across the Channel there’s barely a sector that isn’t now starting to creak under the constant downward pressure.
Beef farmers are now losing up to 400 euro a beast on animals sent to markets where prices are being held back because of the free availability of cheaper Eastern European meat.
Meanwhile, cereal and vegetable growers are watching their balance sheets turn an ever deeper shade of red because of buyers’ refusal to up their prices. And what is becoming abundantly clear is that Macron’s much-vaunted crackdown on supermarket discounting a couple of years back hasn’t helped producers at all; in fact, many have suffered because the result has been to depress sales. The vast bulk of food chain profits are still being raked in by the retailers who, robbed of the additional cashflow discounting generates, are playing an even harder game with their suppliers.
The result is that the traditional French mistrust of technology is being put aside and producer after producer is following the example of many an English farmer and harnessing the power of the internet to start direct selling – with similarly profitable outcomes.
That said, flashpoints are still occurring across the country from Lyons to Brittany as farmers continue to demonstrate over their inability to live on what the markets pay them – and over the way glaring inequalities in the food chain have been forced down the political agenda during the pandemic.
A spring of discontent threatens, with farmers now declaring that the only way out of their situation is