Horsemeat scandal: farmers ‘must not bear cost of tighter regulation’
It is the NFU national conference this week. I feature three stories arising from it. I cant help reflecting and it is not the fault of the NFU, that most national press on things rural concentrate on extremes. We consider its bucolic beauty or yet another crisis to do with food and farming. I’m afraid all three stories at the conference come from that “darker side.” Why are these stories important to local authorities? They are important because farmers manage huge chunks of the landscape, they underpin the viability of many rural communities, we still own land they farm and most of us have little understanding of them.
The first story is about who pays to clean up the horsemeat crisis.
Hard-pressed farmers have warned that they could be driven out of business if they are forced to pay for tighter regulation and testing as a result of the horsemeat scandal.
“Profit margins on beef are wafer thin and not sufficient to bear additional costs,” said Charles Sercombe, chairman of the National Farmers Union’s (NFU) livestock board, at the union’s annual conference in Birmingham.
He spoke after Philip Clarke, chief executive of Tesco, told the conference that the UK’s biggest supermarket would source more meat in the UK and step up scrutiny of suppliers, including installing video cameras at their factories.
That prompted a string of farmers to warn that they could not cope with extra red tape as a result. One farmer said: “That cost cannot come back to us. We are not making any money out of the system and if it comes back to us you won’t have beef, chicken, lamb or pork producers.”
Farmers’ concerns were raised as neither retailers nor the government have made clear who might bear the cost of tougher regulation after horsemeat was found in a number of ready meals labelled as beef. In recent years farmers have been forced to pay more of the cost of regulation including bovine TB testing and stricter regimes on dead animals introduced after previous food scandals including BSE.