WITH AN AVERAGE OF 70 PER CENT of British meat sold via supermarkets, the distribution of animals and meat has had a significant effect on the spread of foot and mouth disease. The clearest indicator is to compare maps showing the spread of foot and mouth in 1967 and now, when the distribution of the disease is much wider. Supermarkets were far smaller businesses in 1967; now they are an industry of giants, with five of them holding the buying power that has drastically changed the way our food is distributed.

Their promise to deliver meat at a very low price is extremely demanding on the supply line. Long-haul distribution is taken for granted, and no distance is seen as too far to transport an animal. But it's cheap. It is said that you can deliver a meal for four from farm to plate for 10p. We now have the anomaly where an animal can travel 200 miles to slaughter, the carcass a further 100 miles for cutting, then to a holding place and finally back to a store near the field where the animal was reared.

Supermarkets either use meat suppliers whose agents travel the country, buying animals at auction or from farms -- or they buy direct from the farmers. Supermarkets insist that their meat suppliers slaughter animals at the "dedicated" abattoir of their choice. Tesco, for example, financed much of the building of, and depend upon, St Merryn Meat, a large abattoir in Cornwall.

One Sussex farmer was approached by Tesco to sell his beef. He was willing to do so until they insisted that the livestock travel to St Merryn for slaughter. He had always used a local abattoir 10 miles from his farm, with a very high standard of hygiene and animal welfare. There, the animals are rested after their short journey in the afternoon and killed at dawn the next day before properly awake. "I shuddered at the thought of my animals travelling all the way to Cornwall in a dirty lorry," he said. He still will not sell to supermarkets.

The supermarkets insist that using dedicated abattoirs guarantees food safety -- but all abattoirs are inspected to the same standards for hygiene, and rogue outfits are rare. The use of dedicated abattoirs has more to do with chasing higher profits. The organic sector, in particular, finds it difficult to meet the demands of meat buyers. Consequently much organic supermarket meat is sourced abroad. Supermarket buyers say they cannot find enough British organic meat, but in fact the farmers are not interested in supplying them, and particularly dislike their system of carting animals long distances to "dedicated" abattoirs. This uniformity is the enemy of organic and small-scale animal husbandry.

It is telling that the abattoir in Essex where the virus was first identified slaughters 60 per cent of the sows in the UK. The idea that supermarkets could buy animals locally, process them locally and sell them in the nearest branch is derided as impractical. But Somerfield, the smallest of the big five, has successfully started such a scheme and has seen a dramatic rise in sales of locally produced meat, to 15 per cent of the total. The tragedy of the foot and mouth disease outbreak may well turn customers away from much- travelled meat, and hopefully turn the supermarkets away from globalisation. (ROSE PRINCE)

Published 4 March 2001
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