Pigs – the good news and the bad news
First the good news – if you’re a pig producer. The UK recently exported its first consignment of pig products to China. As I reported last year, the Danes had discovered the Chinese have very catholic tastes and will pay good money for tails, ears, hocks and offal and they had established a thriving trade supplying those items. Well, since August, the UK is in on it too.
As incomes increase in China, demand is outstripping supply, providing market opportunities for us as well. Indeed the new DEFRA secretary, Owen Paterson, has been out there this week to reinforce such trade. I hope he doesn’t have to personally demonstrate how tasty those delicious morsels can be.
Nearer to home, and more acceptable to European palates, containers of British high-welfare pork are still being exported to Holland. Consignments began about a year ago. At present just one supermarket, Albert Heijn, is stocking it as a “two-star” product (organic has three stars) compared with Dutch pork, which carries only one star. Let’s hope Dutch consumers appreciate the difference and ask for more.
Now the bad news. UK pig producers are losing £10 on every pig sold and that’s despite the market price rising between 8p/kg and 10p/kg dw since July. Rising costs of production, especially for feed, have eliminated any benefit from higher pig prices and producers are destocking in droves. In July and August alone some 7,600 sows were culled in England. That was 13% more than in the same period last year.
Producers continuing in the business are being advised to hold frequent meetings with their bank managers. And a growing number of units are being offered for rent as going concerns or to accommodate stock from one of the handful of big operators which survive by virtue of the scale of their businesses.
Meanwhile, last week the price of wheat on futures markets hit new highs with obvious implications for an industry in which 65% of costs are represented by grain-based feed. Indeed there have been credible forecasts if this goes on there could be a world shortage of pigmeat.
In the UK we are sucking in more imports, mainly from Denmark and Holland, to replace those pigs we no longer produce. In the past 14 years, UK breeding sow numbers have declined from 800,000 to about 430,000. And numbers could be forced down further if imports continue to be allowed from countries where sow stalls are still in use after they are banned across the EU on 1 January 2013. The UK banned stalls in 1999 and domestic producers have been competing against such unfair practices ever since.
In the UK we are sucking in more imports, mainly from Denmark and Holland, to replace those pigs we no longer produce. In the past 14 years, UK breeding sow numbers have declined from 800,000 to about 430,000. And numbers could be forced down further if imports continue to be allowed from countries where sow stalls are still in use after they are banned across the EU on 1 January 2013. The UK banned stalls in 1999 and domestic producers have been competing against such unfair practices ever since.
At least some UK outlets have kept the faith with British producers. McDonald’s has always served British sausages in their 1,200 restaurants in this country. It gets it sausagemeat from 1,700 named farms and serves around three million customers each day. To celebrate this in British Sausage Week, BPEX has just awarded the company its Big Banger trophy. Also last week, BPEX named Heather Jenkins, director of buying for (among other things) meat at Waitrose, as winner of this year’s David Black Award for her consistent support over many years in developing a dedicated supply chain for pigmeat, an example that other retailers have now begun to follow.
As Stewart Houston, BPEX chairman, recently intimated – maybe there are better times ahead.
David Richardson farms about 400ha (1,000 acres) of arable land near Norwich in Norfolk in partnership with his wife, Lorna. His son, Rob, is farm manager.
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