The crisis on pig farms is a national scandal
Wonderful dry and sunny weather again last week making this month very enjoyable it has to be said, but change is afoot. Most farmers are up to speed with autumn work and drills were to be seen everywhere again last week following the plough in some cases but increasingly hitched onto minimal cultivation equipment. There is still quite a debate in agriculture between advocates of the plough and those who have invested in min-till.
Many farmers have both as the weather often dictates which is used and we saw many who only had access to min-till struggle in the very wet autumn/winters of late. The other reason is that many farms have different soils, ranging from sandy loam to heave clay in some cases and choose to cultivate them differently. The one common factor across the board is the size of tractors and equipment these days with output per machine and man far beyond what we could do a few years ago.
Pig farmers and processors have won through at last and government are to allow temporary visas for butchers to come into the country in order to tackle the severe shortage which is causing such havoc on farms. Pig farmers have been culling pigs at a total loss for several weeks now and thousands have been wasted (4,500 killed in the last week alone); a national scandal. Other crowded pig farms have been paid as little as 70p per kg for what is called ‘distress loads’, with the carcasses cut into six primal cuts and exported to China, Poland and the Philippines.
While many would say that this is far better than nothing and at least the meat is eaten, it is once again an example of the farmer carrying all the risk in the supply chain and others taking advantage with money being made on the back of the farmer’s devastating losses. These heavy pigs have already lost the pig farmers money and some units have been making losses for the last 12 months as feed prices increased by 30 per cent and pig prices fell by 20 per cent since July.
AHDB levy body costings tell us that a standard pig price of 144p per kg means a loss of £25 per pig on pigs finished and sold to specification (the right age/weight/fat cover/etc) and the losses when pigs are retained on farm longer due to the inability to butcher are far greater. The National Pig Association (NPA) welcomed the involvement of former Tesco CEO Dave Lewis in the cabinet last week and it is hoped that the government will get a grip on this and the national welfare cull can be brought to a halt before too long.
The NPA has been warning the government for the last four months that if things did not change, a national welfare cull would take place, but were ignored. The blockage seems to be the requirement for immigrant labour to have a certain standard of English and this is on top of shortage of labour on farms, access to carbon dioxide, reduction in exports and the loss of the Chinese market; a perfect storm.
The big question being asked by some is why would anyone buy British pork when imports from some countries are much cheaper? This will be a recurring question as we push up welfare standards in this country, which carry extra costs. We all want the best welfare and the highest standards but coupled with other costs which are also higher we cannot then be expected to compete on a global market.
It is a legitimate question however, and the answer is very similar to other industries and products which can be bought at such low prices that one finds it difficult to understand how they can be produced for that money?
That is ‘globalisation’, where capital flows to countries where the best returns can be made and costs are lowest. We all remember ‘made in Japan’, which became ‘made in Taiwan’; these days its ‘made in China’ and ‘made in India’ and they too will be replaced as costs go up with development and standards of living and other poorer countries take their place; there are several yet to be ‘developed’.
Many people dislike what they see as the exploitation of other human beings, but there is often a long queue of people waiting for these jobs as they offer better prospects and more money than the alternative and in due course the country develops, people’s standard of living go up and things improve. We went through the same cycle in Victorian times as the Industrial Revolution attracted people from the land into towns to work in challenging conditions which certainly had a downside, but often offered secure jobs with better pay.
The Industrial Revolution started here in the UK and therefore British people lost their connection with the land longer ago than other nations. This is now a challenge to farmers as some dislike what we do and many more dislike it being an organised industry. That has however led to many good things, the first and most important being food safety; we can take food safety as a given in this country and no one goes shopping worrying if the food they buy could in any way do them harm; not the case in many other countries.
Our welfare standards are very high and are amongst the highest in the world, our environmental standards are also high and improving all the time. These are also good things, but carry costs and make it difficult for us to compete with other countries who do things differently. Denmark and Holland and of course Germany, Spain and Italy produce a huge number of pigs, but they do it to different standards.
A great deal of Danish and Dutch pig meat comes into this country and it too is completely safe and produced to their high standards, but they are not the same standards as ours. While their pigs are more productive (more piglets per sow) and their herd health is incredibly high, giving them greater efficiency, the pig units are built to deliver that very high health and high efficiency, but there are welfare compromises which are made in order to achieve that.
How do we square this circle? Our higher standards do mean higher prices, but most consumers buy food on price and could not be expected to understand these differences, not that all British food is more expensive, but much of it is a little more, especially when compared to food produced outside the EU. There is enough disparity within the EU, but once one goes beyond the EU to other countries in the world, then there are huge differences in standards and scale.
We need to decide what we want as a nation – do we want to pay a little more for better welfare and environmental benefits, or do we want the cheapest food? We certainly cannot have both and whilst we run down our pig industry, as we have done before when we unilaterally introduced higher welfare standards, imports make up the shortfall. That is how the world works and we should at the very least understand that.