April 2025 – Urban Food Chains

royal-commission

More to margins than money.

peter Apr 22, 2025 0

The Linlithgow committee made it clear to anyone who would listen, that there was more to determining a margin than taking procurement costs away from the current asking price. At one level, this is a tenable position, since a simple rule of thumb would refer to the difference between cost price and selling price as the profit or margin. This discussion was taking place in the dawn of radio broadcasting and there was a steady stream of demands for prices and market data to be made available on the new service, which had yet to develop a full set of public service expectations. There is no way of knowing who exactly was keen to learn the latest market data, but it is likely that a high proportion would have had a professional interest in market movements. Linlithgow and his committee members were adamant that: “…a crude comparison of producers’ or wholesale and retail prices would convey little to the consumer…” The end user, paying the full and final price is unlikely to look much further than a crude comparison, price being only one single aspect of a more complex transaction.

The market variables that determine the range of prices asked for a product will reflect, at the very least, a product’s provenance, its grade, (including ripeness or shelf life), as well as the number of outlets or sources which can supply the required quantity on the required date. It is only fair to observe that price and time often form an unholy alliance that pushes prices up dramatically. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, too. The more you know about something, the greater its value and interest becomes. Needless to say, a product can also change on its way to the end user: large primal cuts of meat would be unmanageable in a domestic kitchen and yet they would be a tad cheaper by weight, reflecting the work that will be carried out between a meat trader buying a side of beef and a retail butcher cutting up stewing steak, for instance. Two prices might not be comparable for a host of reasons. In many ways, money is an incredibly blunt instrument when trying to make intelligent distinctions. But Linlithgow would probably have settled for a crude measure of value when faced with some of the alternatives: “We understand, however, that the Ministry has under consideration a proposal to publish regularly comparative index numbers which will indicate the movement of wholesale or retail prices.”

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There is a persistent belief in some quarters that price is an objective measure. This is only tenable in a one-dimensional market, since transactions have multiple dimensions and consequences that last for years.

more follows later

domestication draft animals

Verdun: the turning point

peter Apr 21, 2025 0

When the first world war started in 1914, the world’s armies were accustomed to seeing imposing troops on horseback leading charges across open ground and engaging in the thick of the action. By the end of the battle of Verdun, in December 1916, the former cavalry units were to be found changing their sabres for machine guns and driving armoured vehicles instead of riding horses.

Verdun marked a pivotal point in the first world war, claiming so many lives that it was known as the “meat grinder”. To this day, farmers are still digging up horseshoes from the former battlefield. After decades of developing increasingly powerful artillery and with the arrival of mechanised warfare, the twentieth century battlefield witnessed the massacre of draft animals on a scale never previously imagined.

The British Army did not appreciate just how few horses it could afford to lose. Moving artillery pieces, carrying munitions to gun emplacements, at the turn of the century, modern armies could not operate without horses. From the front line to the billets, draft animals were ever-present. The war was deadly: on a particularly bad day, over 7,000 were killed in a conflict that claimed more than eight million equine lives. Of these, nearly half a million were attached to the British army in some way. Faced with the eye-watering costs of procuring and transporting horses, the government set up the British army veterinary corps. Its skilled veterinary surgeons treated nearly three quarters of a million draft animals.

Despite going to war with extra horses to keep the army supplied, the German government had problems procuring fodder and some animals starved to death. Importing horse-related items was particularly difficult since traders were refusing to take German currency.

Around the world, the heavy losses of working horses created strong demand for alternative transport capacity. In Britain, the War Office skewed demand for commercial vehicles by dumping 66,000 war surplus lorries and trucks on the market. It is hard to gauge the full extent of wartime losses and their impact on the wider economy, but many businesses that used to be horse-based changed to offer engineering and driving skills.

Horses were among the first animals to be domesticated during the millennia of prehistory. You can be sure that if the energy needed to build the monuments and cities of antiquity did not come from slaves, it came from horses.

pre-history

Seasons on the move

peter Apr 17, 2025 0

Swedish broadcasters revised their schedules to accommodate global warming this week, bringing forward one of the country’s most popular and successful programmes, now going out a week early. Thousands of Swedes are glued to their televisions at this time of year, watching the country’s elk population migrate to summer grazing grounds. This natural event has been the runaway broadcasting success of the decade, celebrating six years of compulsive viewing… Here is a link to BBC coverage of the phenomenon, which is significant for public service broadcasters. Just try scheduling an ad break and you’ll see what I mean.

After watching a fully grown elk cross a swollen river, then defy gravity by hauling its long-legged body on to a sheet of melting ice in the shallows, it is clear that commercial TV cannot compete with nature, which has been doing this for millennia.

The scenario is surreal, with more than a dash of irony. Mass migrations occur around the planet, and, as far as we can tell, they go back for centuries, if not millennia. For a species to migrate and arrive intact requires collective recognition of a set of conditions that have been present at the start of countless earlier migrations. As the Swedish outside broadcasters will tell you, this year the elks are moving early. The chances are that we may never know what was different this year, but the elks have clocked it. At a species level, elks and humans will respond to signal carriers such as barometric pressure or temperature. It is highly unlikely that we will ever have words for more than a tiny percentage of planetary cycles, but we should not stop looking.

France

Who lost out in the revolution?

peter Apr 17, 2025 0

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Napoleon redrew the map of Europe. He suspended all the laws in France that preceded the revolution. He replaced them with a series of codes or simple, clear legal frameworks, giving men total power over women; removing any political power that religions may previously have wielded; defining the laws of things, such as property, along with the rules governing its transfer. The third section covers succession and contracts, listing valid forms of agreement. The code also defines obligations and contracts. It dumped a lot of hard-fought revolutionary principles, not least womens’ rights. It was not until well into the twentieth century that some of these were restored.

The Code de la Commerce established the principle that it should be illegal to sell at a loss. Article L 442-5 has been the object of extensive discussion and attempted modifications ever since, as people have looked for ways round it. When Sarkozy came to power in 2007 there was a determined effort to redraw the political landscape of the French economy. La loi de modernisation de l’économie (LME) was an administrative bulldozer, which slashed payment terms for invoices, setting a new ceiling at 60 days and easing planning requirements for small (less than 1,000 square metres) retail premises. In among the debris was the legislative wreckage of article 442-5.

The parliamentary passage of the LME was a baptism of fire for a novice parliamentarian at the time, Bruno Le Maire. His first major legislative task was a sea change for the economy. He also succeeded in making annual buying reviews for retailers and their suppliers a passage through purgatory by reversing the buying cycle. In previous years, suppliers would deliver goods through the year and meet at the start of the next year to discuss terms for the coming year. With a year’s worth of sales data to hand, suppliers were in a position to offer retailers end-of-year bonuses for specific listings and stay in business. Under Le Maire’s system, suppliers are expected to guarrantee a price for the coming 12 months, field demands for promotional stock and stay in business to do it all again the following year.

Links to further posts on this topic will appear at the foot of this page.

royal-commission UK

MAF ducks change from the word go

peter Apr 12, 2025 0

The Departmental Committee on the Distribution and Prices of Agricultural Produce, generally referred to as the Linlithgow Committee, was proactive in its assessments and investigations of agricultural prices. Its remit covered the empire. The committee took its name from Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow. He went on to chair a Royal Commission on food in India in 1928. Linlithgow, as the media called him, became the last viceroy of India: his 7-year tenure of office ended in 1943, amid scenes of chaos and civil unrest.

On December 11 1924, the second day of the 1925 Royal Commission, a senior MAF (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries) civil servant gave the government response to a raft of administrative measures recommended by the Linlithgow committee. Like a rabbit caught in car headlights, the MAF defence was more a limp lettuce than a fig leaf.

First up was a recommendation to standardise financial reporting for large companies such as United Dairies. MAF headed off further discussion, explaining that the government had “considered” introducing a bill, before playing its trump card: “The matter is now in the hands of the Board of Trade.” Next up, a suggestion that co-operative dairy schools should be revived is fended off with the assertion that a circular on the subject has been issued to all local authorities and “…steps are taken as opportunity offers.” Try getting that back out of the long grass.

The proposition that standing milk advisory committees should be set up to consider and discuss dairy industry issues as the need arose got short shrift. One of these bodies would cover Scotland, another would speak for the dairy industry in England and Wales: the topic prised about a dozen words from MAF: “Separate committees have been set up for England and Wales and for Scotland.” To finish the dairy section of the Linlithgow agenda, the committee urged the government to set and enforce minimum fat contents for whole milk cheese, cream and milk powder, which should apply both to imports and UK production. Sensing an imminent change of subject, the civil servant was more forthcoming. The health minister had made regulations that had come into force during May 1924. Meanwhile, the ministry of agriculture was: “…conducting investigations with a view to determining what standards, if any, may be adopted in respect of whole milk, cheese, and single and double cream.” Nothing gets past a pen pusher.

The Linlithgow committee and its extensive social network existed to promote the interests of landowner members. Its purpose was to develop a consensus around what constituted good practice, modern management and new routes to market. A fair proportion of these families would have benefitted from the compensation lavished on former slave owners: it never occurred to anyone that former slaves had a stronger case for reparations.

The Linlithgow committee (Lc) makes further recommendations, some of which I will list here, with MAF responses where relevant, including paras 258; 260; 302 and 303.

Para 258

Lc urges colleges and local authorities to train students in dairy production, as well as the prevention of spoilage. MAF agrees that this is worthy plan, even if some sites have needed assistance to reinstate standards.

para 260

Lc warns that whey is an ongoing problem, with little prospect of being profitable. MAF reports that a pilot plant has been transferred to Reading university, where development work is in hand.

The topic turns to commercial sharp practice: paras 209, 302 and 303. Since MAF replies to all these items in a single paragraph, I will add MAF’s response at the end of this post.

Lc is concerned that the practice of “averaging returns” is illegal and “not infrequent”. Growers should be checking all the entries on their invoices, the committee warned. Growers were not impressed. Another scam on similar lines started to rear its ugly head. By logging into the sales system under multiple identities, traders could cover their tracks and extract money from linked systems without being caught out.

Faced with significant numbers of food traders routinely breaking laws that may or may not have been enforceable in the first place, MAF resolutely turned its back and looked the other way:

“Efforts are being made to secure voluntary agreement between both sides of the industry on the points raised in their recommendations. If these efforts do not meet with success, it will be necessary to consider the introduction of legislation to deal with the points at issue.”

It would be reasonable to assume that it is the task of government to enforce existing laws and to review legislation that fails to meet the changing needs of the country. Accepting the status quo and asking both sides to play nicely in future resolves nothing. The problems will not go away without appropriate action; on the contrary, they will degenerate into crises.

For discussion of this theme in a more recent context, go to the contents page for France Loses Out and follow the links to individual topics.

More follows later

Turnor UK UK economy

Crusty home truths

peter Apr 10, 2025 0

In 1916, the UK was growing a scant 20% of its total wheat needs. Bearing in mind that most people eat bread, it made the imported 80% of the ingredients for the nation’s bakery goods vulnerable to attacks from early German submarines. The rapid deployment of U-boats left the British vision of the Blue Water policy in tatters, as policymakers relinquished their once unshakeable belief in the Royal Navy’s invincibility. The country’s agriculture was trailing behind the Netherlands and Denmark, leaving unmet demand for cereals to be patched with shiploads of imports. There was no lack of demand among the hungry cities – British consumers were spending some four hundred million pounds a year on food, a figure bandied about by Christopher Turnor, no less.

The country’s disproportionately extensive grassland was not supporting beef production on a comparable scale to continental Europe. Could it be true, as some hardliners argued, that the fabric of British agriculture had been weakened by years of indifference of, among others, policymakers, but also by a shadowy network of traders, fixers and miscellaneous n’er-do-wells? While British livestock accounted for some 60% of meat consumed by the nation, no less than 80% of the UK’s foreign meat imports shipped from a single port in Argentina, by a single firm based in Chicago, oddly enough.

crunchy numbers cultivation haulage ship Turnor

Supply side risks

peter Apr 2, 2025 0

The first world war forced ever greater rates of change than the old order would ever have imagined. Here is a collection of data curated by Christopher Turnor during the first world war and published in Our Food Supply: perils and remedies (Country Life 1916). Any prices quoted are face value at the time, without any subsequent adjustment for historical changes in value. Turnor does not go into detail on the sources of his data and its authenticity, but since he had the run of market information gathered by the Agriculture Board he is unlikely to have needed to look very far. The tables in this post are mostly scanned directly from Turnor’s book, with the intention of giving readers the opportunity to form a view on Turnor’s line of argument. I have made odd comments here or there, but I defer to the readers’ many and varied viewpoints, believing they are better served by sight of the original publication.

The production figures for cereals and potatoes over a 20-year time period are open to question, but the contrasting rates of change suggest that Germany had a strategic advantage in feeding its citizens over this period in its history. Sub-plot: Germany had little access to food grown in overseas colonies, so that supply chains were shorter and more effectively protected from military action.

It is a moot point as to whether a rural population of 20 million in Germany is going to be more productive than thirteen and a half million British empire citizens spread around the globe. There is no obvious equivalence, since resources, skills and infrastructure are not comparable.

Turnor was convinced that British agriculture was being held back by a high proportion of low-earning grass supporting too few grazing animals. Here is what he wrote in 1916:

“In thinking out measures which will increase the amount of our home supplies, the permanent development of agriculture must be the aim. Attempts to increase, hastily and temporarily, the production of the soil must be ineffective and can easily be actually harmful. We must get to the root of the matter. Present conditions affecting agriculture are unsound and unsatisfactory; better ones must be created.” (Christopher Turnor; Our Food Supply, Perils and Remedies, Country Life 1916.)

Scaling up from a county level to national comparisons, Turnor dug out the following figures during the early years of the first world war:

Turnor then presents a set of headline consumption figures. These classify ingredients and the opening table reflects national dietary preferences. The line for rye, for instance, identifies it as a German staple crop, and may well include sale of grain for brewing beer. A similar interpretation of barley being sold for malting would seem reasonable.