A Manchester University study of pork production and consumption has made some hard hitting policy recommendations to help the UK pig industry.
Bringing Home the Bacon asks why the UK domestic herd has halved in size and the UK has become, what the authors of the report see as increasingly dependent upon imports from high wage northern European countries.
Co-author, Dr Andrew Bowman said: "There are four key points as to why this report matters. This report makes four key points ere are 4 reasons why this report matters. Rebalancing the UK economy depends less on our success in high tech and more on our ability to reverse decline in ‘mundane’ everyday activities like pig meat supply. It is crucial to defend food production for security and food processing because it is the UK’s largest manufacturing sector by employment.
"The crisis in pig meat production and consumption is echoed in other supply chains within British manufacturing which have been damaged by actors with a ‘trader mentality’ and ‘point concept of value’. Opportunist dealing creates adversarial, inefficient and dysfunctional supply chain.
"There are better ways to organise the supply chain through vertical integration to ensure participants take responsibility for the overall health of the UK supply chain and horizontal integration to create countervailing power. In different ways , this works in Denmark and the Netherlands and in Bradford for Morrisons.
"Since business models and practices are organisationally embedded, government policy has a crucial role to play in brokering change through innovative new policies like value added promotion which means tax incentives for output increase."
A more in-depth analysis of the report will appear in the July/August issue of Meat Management.
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
