February 2009 - For the Love of it

February seems to be the month that our Pork Industry is hitting the streets and headlines to have their very serious plight heard! While most of us ponder over what to get the wife for Valentine's Day to keep her happy for another 12 months, there is a very harsh reality out there for our British Pig farmers who might not see another 12 months in business!

This week a 'Save Our Bacon' campaign will be launched in London, backed by celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay, Rick Stein and Fergus Henderson. But is it too little too late. Plunging profits and foot-and-mouth outbreaks have already forced many pig farmers out of business.

Can Jamie Oliver do for pigs and pork what he helped do for chickens and eggs? Once again, he wants to help consumers make better-informed choices about the food they eat by showing exactly how pigs live and die to put pork, ham and bacon on our plates at a low price. In my opinion it is vital that the message of spending just a few pence more on your quality of meat will give the farmer a better chance of a reasonable livelihood and certainly better living standards for the pigs.

With the help of the industry, from producers to retailers, this celebrity chef follows the production process from birth to slaughter and on to our supermarket shelves. He looks at how pigs have been bred to suit the demand for lean meat and to maximise choice cuts.

The greater cost to UK farmers of meeting higher welfare standards has left them open to competition from some mass producers from the EU, who minimise costs, but may have questionable levels of animal welfare compared to British standards.

Hundreds of pig farmers will descend on Whitehall to protest at the appalling state of the UK pig industry. The star of the rally - housed in a temporary pen outside Downing Street - will be Winnie the Pig, a sow named after Winston Churchill due to her presence at a similar rally in Parliament Square in 2000. Sadly for Winnie, the pig industry has deteriorated sharply since her last trip to London.

The size of the industry has almost halved over the past 12 years due to rising costs, static meat prices and a glut of imported pork. The UK herd now stands at 450,000, a fraction of its former size.

In recent months, an industry in slow decline has become an industry facing an unprecedented, bloody crisis. This is because cereal prices - the basis of pigfeed - have doubled since last autumn. With pigfeed accounting for up to 65 per cent of the cost of raising a pig, farmers are increasingly finding themselves in an untenable position.

So I close by telling you - "It is up to us people! We must support our local farmers and economy - With the Recession now official; there has never been a better time for us to start being that bit more conscious of where our meat comes from and keep our British markets and farmers afloat!"