Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Crack on and solve this before it’s too late
Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary George Eustice the growing crisis in the egg sector cannot be brushed off
DEAR George, Buy eggs! Hide and hoard! Because all the signs are that we are going to be short of them.
As it is being related to me dozens of egg producers are about to throw in the towel (does a retiring gardener throw in the trowel?) because they can’t make a living with fuel and energy prices at their newly elevated levels and their main customers – the supermarkets – won’t up the ante to help them weather the financial tempest.
Well you can see where this is all coming from. Eggs, like milk, are regarded as a staple and consumers have been conditioned to believe that staple foods are, and must, remain cheap.
Hence the same resistance to increasing the shelf price of eggs as we witnessed with milk. Because no sooner will one of the major multiples lift the price of a dozen, than the rest will be screaming that they aren’t following suit, that their egg prices are remaining static and that consumers are obviously better off giving them their custom.
Another tiresome skirmish in the never-ending price war which successive governments have failed to clamp down on despite all the huge and unquantifiable damage that has been inflicted on the UK farming sector as a result over the years.
Faced with such a situation as now pertains in the egg sector, some other countries would offer bailouts to producers but this, George, is not the answer. The answer here lies in the billions of profits that are still being trousered by the Big Four and which allow plenty of space for manoeuvre on prices.
If only we had a government, George, which was prepared to look around at what’s going on with the climate and international conflicts and conclude that food supply is too crucial an issue to be allowed to drift, deprived of any clear direction.
We have to get a grip on things. We have to start formulating regulations so that producers are paid fairly on a cost-of-production-plus basis so that they can stay in business and keep on supplying the markets.
We have to follow the lead of the French and end reckless and damaging discounting of primary and processed foodstuffs. And we have to put in place a framework which outlaws profiteering and ensures fair shares of the food chain profits for everyone from farmer to retailer.
Have we learned no lessons from the mass panic that ensued at the beginning of lockdown when we saw fighting in supermarket aisles as some products ran out?
Do you really want to have to stand up and explain to the nation why it can’t have an egg for breakfast if the 70 per cent of producers who say they are ready to quit within a year if they can’t get a decent price carry out that threat? Or are you simply happy to paper over the problem by relying on yet more imports – which seems to be the Government’s universal remedy. This despite the fact that in all likelihood the eggs will have been produced in conditions far below those tolerated on British farms, and with all the attendant infection risks that that implies?
I should be delighted to hear your thoughts.
Yours ever, Ian