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Pig farmers take fight to Whitehall
Motorists tooted support and a few MPs emerged to sympathise but otherwise Britain's pig farmers headed home from London still waiting for the right reaction to their big demonstration against the system threatening their future.
They did not know exactly what they were hoping for when they gathered at Downing Street, at noon yesterday, and then walked down Whitehall.
They needed somebody to promise a way of making the big buyers pay more. But it was not clear who or how. And the big guns – the supermarkets and Ministers – were silent.
The London public paused to coo at Winnie the Pig, basking happily on a bed of straw, as she did for three months eight years ago, when the farmers held a series of demonstrations in the capital and got nowhere.
Nobody liked to tell the onlookers that even Winnie could soon become one of the hundreds of breeding sows prematurely killed in the slaughterhouses every day in the latest crisis.
James Paice, Shadow Agriculture and Rural Affairs Minister, turned out to see Winnie and meet some of the crowd – at least 700 representatives of the pig industry and its suppliers and may be as many as 1,000.
Mr Paice echoed the Government line that there is a limit to what politicians can do. EU membership makes it hard to restrict imports, even if they do not meet our welfare standards.
But the Government could do more, and the Conservatives would push them to do more, to make sure that buyers for public institutions imposed the standards, said Mr Paice.
The amount of imported meat served in hospitals, prisons or military cookhouses, was an issue in 1999-2000 and it remained "a scandal" that had not been sorted out, he said. There was also room for some trimming of British bureaucracy.
It was something to take back home – an acknowledgement of a couple of the many arguments aboard the coach which left York at 6.30am and picked up about 50 people on the way to London.
Tim Hogan of Carlton, near Goole, and Gavin Watson, of Selby, were aboard because they are both working out their redundancy notices on a middle-sized pig farm at Burn, near Selby, and wondering what next.
Mr Hogan, 48, a pig hand since he was 15, said: "We might be banging our heads against a wall but at least it feels like doing something."
They are among the first to lose out in the latest shake-out but a trickle of redundancies has been going on for some time and that is why John Davis was on the coach.
Mr Davis, a former Vicar of Drax, is a chaplain, specialising in agriculture, on the industrial outreach team for the Church of England's York diocese.
"The statistics show the countryside as wealthy but that is wealth that has been brought out from the towns," he said.
In the dwindling number of council houses in between the retirement cottages, he sees a spiral of trouble setting in. Part of the problem, he said, was a civil service fashion for thinking in terms of "city regions" which meant that Selby and its surrounding villages, for example, were regarded as suburbs of Leeds.
Alec Black, 76, started with four sows at the age of 15 and now runs 6,000, near Retford. He could not afford to retire, he said. He and his wife, Pam, had a pension investment but they cashed it in to get their farm through the last crisis, for the sake of their five children.
The cold winds of the global market took out about a third of the national pig herd to be replaced by imports. The survivors were incensed when Asda's chief executive said last week that he wanted to hear less about price rises and more about cutting costs.
The coach stopped at Northampton for a breakfast of pies and sausage rolls supplied by Holmefield Farm Services, a York-based veterinary outfit – one of a number of farm-support businesses represented.
What were the pies made of? Pigs from Whixley, near York. It was no day for serving pies without a pedigree. The coach itself was sponsored by Thompsons Animal Feeds of York.
Richard Lister, who farms near Boroughbridge and chairs the producers' group of the National Pig Association, said the crisis had been caused by the soaring price of carbohydrates all over the world rather than cheap foreign competition.
He summed up: "It's a global problem. The competition is cracking too. And it's in the UK's interests to see the UK industry through."
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Why industry is feeling pinch
Feed now costs 180 per tonne – a near doubling in four years.
There were around 455,000 pigs in Britain at the end of last year but that has fallen by around 40,000.
Farmers say demand for pork has increased from 751 to 921 thousand tonnes in nine years.
Demand for bacon in the same period is relatively unchanged at around 450 thousand tonnes per year.
Most of Britain's pig farms are in East Anglia, the north east of England and Yorkshire. Historically, they were close to grain sources.
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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