Imported eggs have no place on child’s plate

Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Liddell-Grainger tells Defra Secretary Thérèse Coffey that the Government’s decision to look into what’s been going on in the egg supply chain will be welcomed by producers up and down the country

DEAR Thérèse, While I might still question why it has taken quite so long to get the wheels in motion – given that the initiative was announced in May – I nonetheless welcome the decision to carry out a review aimed at ending unfair practices in the egg supply chain.

I know the move will be welcomed by producers across the country – at least those who are still in business after the positive tsunami of cost increases that has swept through the sector in the last 12 months.

I note the announcement about the exercise contains reference to ‘fairness’ in the supply chain. That term will be somewhat unfamiliar to many egg producers who operate in a sector where – as with so many other commodities – fairness went out of the window years ago.

Like their colleagues in meat and dairy, vegetables and fruit, egg farmers have been left at the mercy of an industrial-scale retail sector.

In many cases there is no room for price negotiations and they are left with two choices – take it or leave it.

And I know full well that the margins in egg production were eggshell-thin even before the latest round of cost uplifts. Hence the destocked houses we saw earlier this year.

In many ways, of course, the egg sector is proving to be somewhat more resilient than others and our egg self-sufficiency is still running at around 86 per cent.

On the other hand we are still importing 1.5 billion eggs a year and, of course, the more the financial pressure squeezes British producers and forces them out of the industry, the more we shall have to rely on the eggs other countries choose to send us.

Which brings us round to what the quality criteria are for imported eggs and the conclusion that since the UK has always embraced higher quality standards, the likelihood is that what is trucked over from the continent is liable to originate in premises where welfare and feed standards fall some way short of what would be tolerated here.

While some might argue that the British shopper won’t care too much about that as long as eggs of some sort are available, I would suggest that consumers have become very much more quality-conscious in recent years and that eggs are one of the few foodstuffs where inferior quality is readily detectable.

I thought we were trying to improve the national diet and particularly to ensure that our children were able to eat healthier and generally better than their parents. Cheap imported eggs of dodgy quality do not, therefore, seem to have any place on a British child’s plate.

We absolutely must make this review a precursor of real reforms in the egg supply chain so that producers can make a decent living and shoppers can continue to have access to affordable quality-assured eggs.

Even if that can only be achieved by retailers taking a slightly lower cut.

It is not, after all, as if they couldn’t afford to.

> We are still importing 1.5 billion eggs a year, says Ian