Defra agrees to NPA-NFU roundtable over pig industry crisis
Farming minister Victoria Prentis has agreed to a request by the National Pig Association (NPA) and National Farmers’ Union (NFU) for a roundtable event to discuss the ongoing pig industry crisis.
NPA chairman Rob Mutimer and NFU president Minette Batters wrote to Defra Secretary George Eustice in January, calling for him to “arrange a summit of the entire pig supply chain so that we can agree a plan to get these pigs off farms and onto people’s plates.”
Responding, Prentis said “convening a roundtable bringing together producers, processors and retailers to discuss the ongoing challenges faced by the sector would be helpful.” According to NPA, the date of the meeting will be arranged “shortly”.
Prentis acknowledged that recruitment of butchers via the temporary visa route, which closed to new applications on 31st December, had “taken longer than initially expected”, but said processors could still recruit butchers via the new points-based immigration system, introduced in January 2021.
NPA said Prentis also recognised that the uptake of both the Private Storage Aid (PSA) and Slaughter Incentive Payment (SIP) schemes has been lower than anticipated, but said she believed the extensions and changes to the schemes “if taken up by the processors, will help to further reduce the current backlog of pigs on farm.”
“Urgent solutions” needed
Mutimer welcomed the news but said that there will be many urgent matters to address at the meeting. He said: “We desperately need to get everyone together, so we can explain just how serious things are on farm – many people are now utterly desperate – and to try and find urgent solutions to get things moving, and also to share the burden of all this more evenly.”
He said that that if nothing changes, the industry is not going to be able to process the backlogs of animals until late spring or early summer. He added: “That, I’m afraid, will simply be too late for many pig farmers. This is a crisis unfolding in front of our eyes – and we must act collectively now to save the British pig industry.”
The NPA said it is continuing to talk to retailers and look for potential solutions ahead of the meeting to ensure it achieves “some meaningful outcomes.”
Schemes not “used as much as we hoped”
Speaking at the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (EFRA) on Tuesday 1st February, DEFRA Secretary George Eustice said that the measures put in place by the government in response to the industry’s backlogs “[haven’t] been used as much as we hoped.”
Eustice said that the Temporary Visa Scheme launched in October 2021 made provisions for around 800 workers, but he estimated that the number of workers using the scheme was somewhere in the low hundreds.
He said: “They’ve not been recruiting in the way we thought they might, given that ‘labour shortage’ was one of the key issues they kept highlighting. It’s also the case that we hoped that they would run ‘Saturday slaughter days’ and culls in order to clear the backlogs.”
Eustice added that he thought processors “could have dropped the price of pigs” in order to put unprocessed, unbutchered carcases on “the open market”.
He continued: “They haven’t generally done that to the extent that we would like. There are things that government has tried to do to offer them what they wanted, but we do also need those processors to try to do their bit as well, to run additional culls.”
The DEFRA Secretary went onto say that the request for a private storage aid scheme, which was tabled at a meeting in October 2021, was “not particularly used”, and that additional payments to processors so that they could run overtime was “not being taken up as much as we would like.”
Eustice confirmed that Defra would meet with pig farmers to discuss the ongoing issues.
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