Sign The Pig Farmers' Petition

Channel4 went into overdrive about the welfare of chickens recently. Yes, organic is best, but at a price.  The second choice is free range eggs, which we all prefer to buy as townies, thinking of the good life, and clucking, contented hens.

But it was, of course, not so. The supermarkets demand quantity, and not always quality. They charge for the best, but cut prices as low as they can for the rest. The public - that is us - have been weaned on a diet of cheap food. Unlike the French we do not really rate the value of food, and therefore are willing to pay little for it.  It is all very well saying that single mothers or those on benefit cannot afford to pay a real price for food.  Yet, they do not know how to use the cheap cuts of meat, or how to use cooking as an ally anymore.

As a result of the celebratory TV chefs, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, the chicken production industry was put through the mill.  Even at the Oxford Farming Conference, which I attended recently, the Minister Hilary Benn said that he would back the ending of batteries for hens by 2012, and would not cut it short, as he had been asked.  But in reality, the Government's proposal will not be an end to battery kept hens.  Instead it is merely enlarging the size of their wire cages. Euro hypocrisy indeed!

There are plenty of regulations about chicken and egg production. For example, the much vaunted ‘free range’ only requires that there are openings in huge chicken sheds that lead to the outdoors. It does not say the chickens have to go outside. Quite often they do not choose to, and one farmer told me recently that they have been disencouraged in the past by the placing of an electric fence two yards from the opening!

As for the pig farmers they would like to be able to sell the public free range pork, but there are not rules that cover this. The Soil Association has strict rules that cover the production in the UK of organic pork. But these rules do not apply to the rest of Europe, especially the big pork producing nation of Denmark, who can put allegedly organic products into the British market that would not qualify if they were produced here.

Andrew Knowles is Strategy co-ordinator of the British Pig Executive. He told me that 70% of pigmeat imported into this country is not produced to the legal standards that are in place in this country. For example, there is a ban in Britain which started in 1998, which stops sows being kept in metal cages after having their piglets, but in the rest of the Europe this is not so.

"What we would like to see is something like the information on egg boxes saying how those eggs have been produced," explains Andrew.  "We would like the Food Standards Agency to put down some rules and basically define the words  ‘free range’.  To qualify, sows should be kept in the open air and their piglets kept out there until maybe six weeks old when they could be brought into a straw floored open sided barn.”

I talked with farmer Stewart Taylor who supplies pork, among other meats to farmers markets around London. 

“I cannot use the word free range about my pork, because there is no way I would be legally allowed to," says Stewart.  "I tell my buyers within towns and cities how I bring them up, which is humanely. All my sows are out of doors and their piglets stay with them before they are moved into our open barn. I think they taste better as a result.”

The British Pig Executive is also worried about the future of their industry.  Andrew Knowles tells me that it costs more to produce pig meat here than anywhere in the world.

"More farmers are giving up keeping pigs every week, and in nine months time there will be a real shortage of bacon. That is what everyone eats - but the supply will become less and less.  Feed prices for pigs have risen steeply, the prices have gone up to the public, but have not trickled down to the farmer. It is a serious situation.”

Like me, you should sign the pig farmers petition on their website and help them fight for a better future for our food. Visit http://www.pigsareworthit.co.uk.

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