British pig farmers rallied in London yesterday to draw attention to the plight of the industry, with most losing £20-30 for each pig they produce.
I wondered if much would come of their rally or if anything would change, especially given that the Competition Commission believes the problem is that there are too few supermarkets.
I had my answer tonight, when I watched in amazement as Somerfield paraded their latest offer across our television screen — legs of pork for £2.79 a kilogram, down from £6 a kilogram.
I wonder who’s going to bear the cost of that offer?
Commercial pig farmers receive about £1.10 a kilogram for their pigs, but are under pressure to accept even less—even though feed costs are up 76 per cent year on year and total production costs are up by 34 per cent. (Figures from The Impact of Feed Costs on the British Pig Industry, published by BPEX.)
By the time the pork has been through the supply chain to the supermarkets, the price paid by consumers hits the £6 per kg mark depending on cut (and origin—about two-thirds of imported pork is produced to lower standards than are required in the UK and it’s therefore cheaper still).
So, if a 1kg leg of pork from Somerfield is going to cost the consumer £2.79, how much will the processor, abattoir and farmer receive?
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Pigs are worth it — campaign site.
We have a similar problem in Australia at the moment. Many of our pig producers are going out of the business and yet we are still importing most of our pigs from Canada. Crazy! One of our friends has just recently sold up her pig growing business - she simply couldn’t produce pigs for the prices she was being offered - in fact she was loosing $5.00 per pig buy the time all expenses were added in.
Somerfield must be totally confident that their customers don’t know or care about the plight of the pig farmers despite the well-publicised march yesterday. Sadly, I think they are probably right.
In general supermarkets do not care about the producers all they care about is the profit margins. If you remember to a couple years back somerfield did the same think with Irish beef at the time that beef farmers were finding it hard In the north east and it made the press how Turriff somerfield were stocking irish beef and the slaughter house in turriff was in financial ruin. As to the pigs suppliers to Grampian were told that they would not get any increase in price because of the tough market conditions. At the time the scottish pig producers threatened cutting supplies and got a 12p/kg increase approved for later this year but that will still not be enough with feed prices as they are. The pig industry has always been volitile and the same thing happened back in the mid 90’s.