The Myth of Cheap Food

Before Christmas on the BBCs Farming Today, I heard a discussion about the fall in prices that hill farmers were getting for their lambs. The reasons for this are a complex collection of problems, but while I risk over simplifying the factors, they are; the increased cost of feed, the oversupply from imports, and the restrictions caused by the outbreak of Foot and Mouth.

With the restrictions on movements that the outbreak of Foot and Mouth caused, farmers were not able to move the lambs off of the hills, even when the sheep had eaten all the grass. Some farmers were able to provide supplementary feeding, but this was not always possible either due to cost or lack of feed. For these hard-pressed farmers the cost of feed was and is important as lambs are only selling at market for five pounds (Eight Dollars US) in extreme cases. The average price has been lower from twenty-eight pounds (Fifty Dollars US) per lamb to fifteen pounds (twenty-eight Dollars US) per lamb. That obviously reduces the income of farmers who are making very little to start with. Incidentally we also had two hundred and fifty thousand lambs slaughtered in what the government called a welfare cull. An oxymoron if ever I heard one.

So with falling prices at the market we the consumers are getting cheaper meat? Using misinformation the major supermarkets increased prices for lamb. This brings me to what I heard on the radio. One of the farming groups looked at the price of the cuts of meat from the lamb and by reconstructing a lamb from the cuts of meat they worked out that the average price of the meat was about five pound fifty per kilo, ten times the price the supermarkets were paying for the carcass. That also represents an increase of nearly twenty percent on the price that consumers are paying.

So I carried out the same exercise and again after Christmas to ensure that it was not just a hike in price for the holiday season. I found the same prices myself.

Environmentally, this is a disaster. If farmers can no longer stay in business we lose the custodians of our landscape. The countryside only looks the way it does because of the way those farmers manage the land. Further, particularly on the hills, it is only because of grazing that the habitats for much of the wildlife exists.

In the past and I am only talking ten to fifteen years ago, subsides meant that farmers could only afford to farm the hills by overstocking the hills, this lead to large-scale erosion and environmental degradation. Fortunately the way support was paid was changed and this dramatically improved the situation and reversed the problem. What the supermarkets are doing will destroy ten years of hard work.

Additionally the way that the supermarkets protect their margins by dictating to farmers the price they will pay for meat, means that farmers can only make farming pay by increasing the number of animals on any farm and reducing the welfare standards for the livestock. Most farmers do care about their animals, but farmers are often forced to cut corners to make farming pay. The supermarkets know this but hide behind systems that are supposed to ensure welfare standards.

If we look at chicken as an example, where the birds are regularly feed antibiotics to grow faster and fatter, this practice has caused antibiotic resistance and has major implications on human health. Further, having large concentrations of any animal in a small area creates pollution. Farming always used to be exemplars of recycling, as nothing was waste it all had a use on the farm.

Had farming and particularly factory farming had to pay for the pollution it created, then food prices would double at least. Yet we still have to pay for this, indirectly by higher water bills and higher taxes. Also as the supermarkets will utilise anything that can be considered food, take the example of mechanically recovered meat, while they make billions in profit, they are poisoning our children and us.

While that trolley may be full of cheap food from the supermarket there is a hidden cost.





My gratitude to Fran Purdy for the kind permission to use her magnificent picture of the Ewe and Lamb taken on the Yorkshire hills, her website can be found at www.pbase.com/jenga