Farmers debate their involvement in live export trade

Do you regard live exports as an essential trade or do you regard them as something that should be stopped because they are a PR disaster for farming?

As part of Farmers Weekly’s Big Debate series, we are asking for your views on the issue – either by voting on Question of the Week or pitching in with your comments on the forums.

Here’s a flavour of some of the comments received so far:

“Frank Langrish makes the point convincingly for his animals to be moved to France/Holland for slaughter, as it is closer to him than Dorset. In so doing he shows a weakness in the CIWF’s argument which classes the journey from Kent to France as ‘export’ (a pejorative term in this context), whereas the longer journey from Kent to Dorset is not considered in such a manner,” said Peter Wells.

“We farmers are rightly proud of the high standards of animal welfare practised on the majority of British farms – standards that have even withstood the publicity surrounding the plethora of farming and food programmes. And, as the public respond to calls for eggs, dairy products and meat from animals that are kept to the highest welfare standards, we have a great opportunity to exclude lower standard (and cheaper) imported products from our markets. So why do we farmers endanger public support for our produce by insisting that we must be able to export live animals? It’s a public relations disaster. Surely we should be aligning ourselves with public sentiment.” Branston Pickle

“What many of us strongly dislike , including Frank Langrish probably, is very long journeys with almost immediate slaughter at the other end of the trip, regardless of whether the journey crosses a national border.” Dick Plumb

“Would we be having this debate if it was titled “Intra Community Trade”? If I was a sheep farmer in Poitiers, Central France and I sold lambs to an abattoir in Holland for around £80.00 plus at the moment, these sheep would travel around 7 hours and cross two EU countries. I am sure that no one in Europe would have any concerns about that trade as it will have been less than an 8 hour journey. Many lambs come from Central Scotland to North Wales for slaughter and then end up in France. This is a similar length of journey and occurs daily. I would like to take lambs to an abattoir across 22 miles of water to slaughter in less than 3 hours and this is considered to be terrible.” Frank the Wool

“CIWF is not against the export of high value pedigree breeding stock provided that these animals are transported to high welfare standards. It is not sea crossings that is the issue here (apart from animals being transported by sea in bad weather conditions), but the length of the journeys.” Carol Yesson – CIWF

Read more on the Big Debate discussion thread where you can also take part yourself.