Better animal health can help cut costs, says report

The report crossed paths this week with a speech from a UN Environment Programme official saying that farming in the UK, USA and Germany, cost more than it delivered, when elements like pollution, consumption of natural resources and human and animal health effects were valued. The speech, made in Paris by Asad Naqvi, added to a developing UN theme that artificial nitrogen has been driving crop productivity in rich nations for too long.

Dr Naqvi said people “may have to sacrifice their quality of life and their economic growth to live inside the limits of the earth”. CIWF’s chief policy adviser, lawyer Peter Stevenson, says in their report that the next big change in the costing of agriculture will be to include “externalities” like the environmental costs of intensive feeding.

He told the Yorkshire Post: “What took me by surprise, when I started looking for the figures, was where they were coming from – respectable and cautious bodies like the World Bank and the United Nations and our own government’s Foresight Report.”

His report starts off by arguing that free-range eggs and high-welfare pork are already relatively inexpensive, in conventional terms, and the average consumer could switch to both for less than 11p a week. He goes on to argue that better animal health can often repay less intensive production. He gives the example of longer-lived dairy cows having more and healthier calves than champion milkers and points to similar analysis coming out of the pig industry.

But his main argument is the coming importance of “externalities” and the ways in which they might be valued.

He says: “A Dutch study recently concluded that the ‘true cost’ of conventionally farmed pork was at least 1.12 euros (97p) per kg greater than the true cost of organic pork.”

He quotes the Foresight Report on Food & Farming, pulled together by the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, saying: “There needs to be much greater realisation that market failures exist in the food system that, if not corrected, will lead to irreversible environmental damage and long-term threats to the viability of the system. Moves to internalise the costs of these negative environmental externalities are critical.”

CIWF is lobbying for more emphasis in the Common Agricultural Policy on animal welfare outcomes the general public would like.

The report points out there is already provision for subsidy of animal welfare improvements, under Article 40 of the Rural Development Regulations, and that Scotland and Ireland are among the few countries to have taken advantage of them. Scotland supports better health in cattle and sheep through its Animal Health & Welfare Management Programme. The Republic of Ireland has its Suckler Cow Welfare Scheme.

The CIWF calls for:

More CAP emphasis on “practices valued by society which the market will not automatically reward (carbon sequestration, biodiversity-rich environments, higher animal welfare, preventing pollution and waste)”.

Mandatory labelling for animal welfare standards on all food, including imports.

Tax relief on investment in high-welfare farming and/or VAT reductions on its food products.

The CIWF report, Reviewing The Costs, can be found at http://tinyurl.com/3w8eow2