Chickens and the power of Big Business

This week saw the AGM of Tesco's the largest retailer in the UK. What is worth remarking on is that they receive eight out of every ten pounds of the retail spend in Britain. That is not just of the food spend, but of all of the retail spend.

Therefore it was not that surprising that the TV chef, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall attempt to get Tesco to raise the welfare standards for the chickens they sell, failed.

By becoming a shareholder in Tesco, he was able to get a motion tabled that called upon Tesco to raise the welfare standards for the chickens sold as food. Tesco made this as difficult for him as possible, forcing him to pay eighty thousand pounds on the literature to contact all the shareholders regarding the motion. As anyone who has heard the news he got support from ten percent of the shareholders, but the motion was ultimately defeated.

While other supermarkets need to shoulder their share of responsibility in the way that animal welfare is abused to bring cheap food to the supermarket shelf, as the largest retail in the UK, Tesco should have provided a moral lead here. But they have shown it is profits at any costs that is their motivation not quality or welfare.

In tests in a food laboratories it has been shown that the so called Standard Chicken has more than one hundred grams of fat per kilo than does a free range bird. Further, free range birds have a higher proportion of Omega 3 fatty acids, the good fats that we need, than do barn reared birds.

With a epidemic of health problems related to obesity, the standard chickens that the supermarkets are offering are far from the healthy food that we are being deliberately misled, to believe them to be.

Tesco make as profit about seventy pence ($1.30) per standard chicken sold, the farmer makes only three pence (5c), from a retail price of £2.50 ($4.75). The difficulty that most people overlook at the checkout is that for anything to be so cheap someone must be loosing out somewhere. Here it is the farmer, and ultimately the chicken. This callous disregard for the welfare of the animals we choose to eat, lessens us as people.

Additionally the intensive keeping of animals for food has a serious environmental impact, as the volume of manure produced becomes a problem. In the past with the less intensive production of meat animals, the manure was a benefit that fed the land. Now it harms it.

However, the real threat from intensive animal production is that any disease problems quickly become an epidemic. In history it was only when there was a realisation that overcrowding, sewage, clean water and hygiene that were key to solving the problems of public health, that many of the diseases of the past were finally overcome. Yet we seem to have forgotten that lesson when it comes to animal health and welfare.

With an increase in the prevalence of campylobacter in chickens, we could be paying for our cheap food with the costs of treating food poisoning. Just as we made some dumb decisions that lead to BSE, who knows what problems will emerge from this.

While I do appreciate that food prices are increasing and that this effects poor people much more than it does the more affluent, but there is a hidden cost to cheap food and with Tesco's posting record profits, it clear that they are profiting from the backs of the poor.

Chickens and Welfare Standards in Farming

Here in Britain on one of the TV channels there has been a season of programmes looking at the production of cheap chickens. For my overseas readers, it has been possible to buy two “standard” chickens for five pounds. Even buying them individually they are still only three pounds each.

Now having once been a vegetarian simply because when I adopted that diet in the late 1970s it was simply that I could not trust the quality and the ethics of the meat being proffered to me. Over the years farming practices did improve amongst a few enlightened people, and it became possible to buy meat from ethical sources. I even kept my own chickens for meat and eggs so I know from experience how well chickens can be kept.

That experience also highlighted for me just how detached people have become from their food supply. Even when offered a fresh, humanely killed plucked and dressed bird they would rather eat a cheap chicken from the supermarket, as they didn’t like the idea of knowing where their meat came from.

It is this fact that allows the supermarkets to control the way that farming and welfare standards are administered. The supermarkets and the food industry in general are forcing farmers to reduce the costs of production by constantly sourcing some of its product from cheep low standard overseas producers. Effectively forcing farmers to produce low welfare standard meat at the costs of third world farming within a developed world economy.

Here in the UK every attempt to raise welfare standards by farmers, NGOs and even the government are being undermined by the supermarkets. The only ethics that these businesses have (Supermarkets and the Food industry) is that of making a profit, no matter what the cost.

Listening to the discussions and debates on the news it struck me that all the excuses that were being proffered by the industry could so easily have been interchanged for a debate on slavery. Apart from the ethics of low welfare standard production, it is these intensive methods of food production that have lead to the food scares. In the UK there was a problem with salmonella in eggs, now happily eliminated, but it would never have occurred had the welfare standards been higher.

All the supermarkets could eliminate this problem if they were to pay farmers more than three pence per bird, and only selling chickens from the higher welfare standard methods of production. While I would love to see only free-range production I am realistic and realise that far to many people don’t care about the food they eat. That is reflected in the rubbish that most people eat instead of real food.

Equally the food industry needs to respect when the government imposes higher welfare standards. Here in the UK a pig production company, DRS, has gone into administration leaving around ninety farmers unpaid. While the reason for this company going bust is related to Foot and Mouth, an important aspect is that the supermarkets refused to pay more for the higher welfare standards of UK pig farmers and switched to buying imported pork where welfare standards are lower.

All this means that we the consumer are being conned into thinking that food must be cheep. Yet while we can add to the carbon footprint by importing foods, we will eventually loose our means of producing food. That makes us in the UK vulnerable to any sudden hike in energy costs, or even any terrorist action that disrupts food imports.

In the UK there is a major problem with obesity, if the government actually started to impose higher standards on food and food production then this would improve health and go a long way towards the UK reducing its green house gas emissions.

This is all a pipe dream I know, as the trouble is that profits are more important than ethics.

Climate Change and Bird Populations

While the effect of a warming climate will have many predictable consequences, it is the impacts that the majority of the population don’t think about that are in fact the more serious ones.

In some migrating birds choosing not to winter in the UK, many people will assume that this is just a minor matter. Interesting to note but what will be the impact upon my life, they will say. Well, the impacts could be greater than people assume.

Because of the importance of the UK as wintering grounds our agriculture practices have been modified to accommodate these influxes of birds. This is not just about the crops that are grown but the husbandry of farm animals. When you have large populations of birds migrating to the UK there has to be a food source for them, geese and ducks will help clear large areas of grass, thus reducing the cost of farming these lands. Also some of the birds will feed on grubs and insects that present over winter, keeping that population in check. Who knows what the effect on human and animal health this change will bring.

Further there is the impact upon tourism in the areas where these birds flock; there are many small communities that are reliant upon the tourist pound that the bird’s presence brings.

Then there are the problems for the communities where the birds are now choosing to over winter. Will the birds be competing for valuable or scarce resources? Are they competing with man for these? If the answer to any of these is yes the populations of these many species of birds will be at serious risk.

Climate change is already creating a serious problem for the summer breading populations of sea birds. The warming of the seas is reducing the populations of sand eel’s that so rely on to feed and raise their young. This means that populations of internationally important species are in decline. But its not just the effect upon the birds that this should be causing concern, what about the rest of the food chain and the fish that humans eat? In the North Sea fish stocks are already looking as if they are in terminal decline.

There will be some people who will think that this doesn’t really matter, there are other more important issues to worry about, but the reality is this is the most important issue of the day. Unless we act now, we not only risk causing the mass extinction of animal populations, but our own extinction as well.