Amazingly, there are still folk around Britain who have failed to grasp the meaning of the words”third country”, let alone why it matters. The Centre for Inclusive Trade reports a 16% drop in British food exports to the EU and is calling for concessions that would be unfair to other third countries. There isn’t a cat in hell’s chance of the European Commission doing a special deal for a former member state that opted to become a third country.
A number of scientific journals are running stories in their November issues about species that routinely consume alcohol as a part of their diet. Naturalists argue that it would be strange if animals were to avoid naturally-occurring sources of alcohol, such as rotting fruit. The topic got a fresh airing in specialist titles, such as Science Daily or the news pages of Phys.org, as well as UK dailies such as The Independent and The Guardian.
The impetus for the current editorial interest comes from Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The journal collates behavioural observations from past years, to make a strong argument for removing anthropocentric assumptions about alcohol and the routine overlooking of certain aspects of dietary intake in wild populations. For instance, levels of Alcohol By Value (ABV) can top 10% in over-ripe palm fruit, while ethanol can be routinely detected in 29 of Costa Rica’s 37 fruits routinely eaten by the country’s frugivores.
All around the Mediterranean and across southern Europe, thousands of communities are waiting for this year’s olive crop to be milled. Until this year’s production is ready for packing, no new business can be written: there are no reserve stocks available. Every last litre has been sold and there will be no olive oil to sell before the first deliveries of the new crop year reach the market.
For months bulk olive oil prices have been sky high. As recently as August, some desperate buyers in Spain were paying almost 7,000 Euros a tonne for low-grade lampante that would normally have been a fraction of today’s prices. In August, the Spanish industry was forecasting a crop of 1.4 million tonnes of olive oil this year. This “business as normal” bravado is misplaced, since hot weather in the final weeks before the crop is gathered will affect the moisture content and can reduce the yield. In previous years, yields of 20% were average: but until this year’s crop reaches the mills, there is no reliable way of predicting finished tonnages. However, apart from wildfires, there is probably not a lot of additional damage that the environment could inflict on the nation’s olive groves.
The Spanish government is responding to the crisis by cutting VAT on olive oil from 5% to 4%, with effect from 2025. Consumers have seen retail olive oil prices rise from around EUR 3 / litre two or three years ago to hover around EUR 10 / litre now. The unthinkable is happening and Spanish consumers are buying sunflower oil instead of olive oil for home use. Since many households buy cooking oil in small quantities very often, Spaniards have suffered more from the rising prices than elsewhere in Europe. This is because most European retailers place huge orders immediately after the harvest is in, to cover the coming 12 months sales. This fixed price for the year means that retail bottle sizes can have stable prices for the duration, although there is a temptation for retailers to raise olive oil prices anyway, pushing up their margins.
Spain has imported 20,000 tonnes of olive oil this crop year, bringing Spanish consumer consumption and industry intake to a total of 100,590 tonnes. Bottler stocks in August were at an all-time low of 131,740 tonnes with a further 138,660 tonnes held by co-operatives and millers. Total production at the close of this crop year is expected top 820,000 tonnes, making it a poor year. An average season these days would be somewhere between one and two million tonnes of oil.
This year saw a closing of the gap between Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) and cheaper grades. Paradoxically, strong demand for better grades meant that the market was picked clean, leaving mainstream buyers to pay more for lower quality grades because that was all there was left. Formerly used to fuel oil lamps, as the name suggests, today lampante refers to oil that needs work to return it to an edible grade. This means that lampante has a limited number of takers, since the consignment will need to go to a refinery, adding to the cost and commercial risk.
After four years of test marketing, ASDA is taking down the refill stations that were installed at four UK stores. The proposition was simple: invite customers to bring in their own packaging (glass jars and the like) or use a new container from the refill station. They could then fill these from bulk containers, weigh the goods and take a till slip, to settle at the checkout. The fact that this project survived for four years suggests that ASDA did not lose any money with it: the retailer cites low consumer uptake as one of the main reasons for dropping the scheme. The story opens a whole raft of issues, far too broad to do it justice here, although there are some topics that we shall be revisiting in the coming weeks.
From the soaring concrete cliffs of Brussels there is an impending explosion of anger. The reason? Look at Charles Sharp’s impressive picture of a puffin, just about to enter the home burrow with a beak full of sand eels. It is the fish, not the bird, that is fanning the flames, by the way.
For all its comical looks, the puffin is an important indicator in the monitoring of the marine environment around the British Isles. Researchers are particularly interested in the fish stocks that support this distinctive seabird. The term sand eel is a generic label for a group of about 200 fish species that resemble eels but are not related. They burrow into sandy seabeds and hide from predators while keeping an eye out for their own lunch. Hard to catch in open water, they are easy to scoop up in a dredge, as Danish fishermen have done for centuries.
Puffins are far from being the only bird species to be tracked by scientists. It just happens to be the cutest one of the bunch. The puffins’ lunch, by the way, is at constant risk of damage from bottom trawling, that is to say beam trawls or dredgers and other devices. Scallops is one species to be caught in dredgers, while cod is a target species for many beam trawls.
Back in January this year, the UK government announced a ban on dredging for sand eels in UK-controlled Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). For the record, bottom trawling is allowed across 98% of the MPAs concerned, suggesting that the state of the seabed has not been a political priority for years. In the North Sea, with its sandy sea floors, there are still beam trawlers fishing demersal species and small number of Danish dredgers who, between them, hold about 90% of the 160,000 tonne sand eel fishing quota. (UK and EU total)
The origins of the Danish sand eel fishery go back to the soaring livestock holdings of the late nineteenth century, which set the Danes looking for cheap ways of feeding animals. Initially, small dredges were fitted to inshore boats, scaling up in the early twentieth century to purpose-built diesel powered vessels with an ever greater range. For some reason, as with a number of other fisheries, nobody imagined that the fish stocks would ever decline: until, that is, the catches started to drop. With growing numbers of animals on livestock holdings, the potential earnings from sand eels rose, as did the pressure on the fish stocks. Sand eels, along with other oily fish and suitable bycatch, are the ingredients of fishmeal, an industrial end product turned out in large quantities by refineries that earned a living clearing up after the high value fish processors in fishing ports.
In the early days of indoor livestock, fishmeal was added at two thirds to one third cereals. As researchers extended their knowledge of livestock nutrition, the proportion of fishmeal was reduced, making animal feed more profitable or cheaper, depending on your involvement in the process. To ensure an illusion of sustainability for food production in the late twentieth century, the European Commission devised the Common Fisheries Policy, which used its budget to subsidise a rise in the European fishing industry’s tonnage and horsepower, ensuring an ever more unstable fishing industry.
Fast forward to 2024, and the European Commission is threatening to trigger a dispute procedure under the EU-UK Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA). The Commission is acting on behalf of Danish sand eel fishers with fishing vessels to maintain. If agreement is not reached by mid-June, the Commission can request a judgement on the UK’s action. While any hearings may be carried over into September, the European Commission is calling for an “evidence-based, proportionate and non-discriminatory” approach to protecting marine environments.
“The UK’s permanent closure of the sand eel fishery deprives EU vessels from fishing opportunities, but also impinges on basic commitments under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement,” warned commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius. “Measures are already in place to protect this important species, including by setting catches below the scientific advised levels and closed areas for protecting seabirds,” he added. London responded, saying that DEFRA had not authorised any sand eel quota for British vessels for the past three years. Marine protection NGOs across Europe have launched a campaign to end bottom trawling, which is still allowed in 90% of the EU’s marine protected areas (MPAs). Last year Europe agreed to an EU Marine Action Plan that phases out bottom trawling by 2030. This has some way yet to go.
According to the European Market Observatory for Fisheries and Aquaculture Products (EUMOFA) the EU produces between 10% to 15% of the world’s fishmeal and fish oil output. Tonnages of EU fishmeal range from 370,000 tonnes and 520,000 tonnes, while fish oil ranges between 120,000 and 190,000 tonnes. Denmark accounts for nearly half the EU’s total output. In addition to sand eels, EU processors use small pelagics, such as sprats, whiting or herring, all regulated with quotas and topped up with trimmings from fish processors. EU demand for fishmeal has dropped in recent years and is currently hovering around 450,000 tonnes/year.
Sky News is currently streaming an overview of British farming (https://news.sky.com/story/it-keeps-me-awake-at-night-can-british-farming-survive-13132220) which raises a number of questions that have been dodged for years and are coming home to roost with a certain inevitability. They are as predictable as ever, as intractable as ever and demand answers as urgently as ever. The only certainty is that the farming sector faces a crisis which has been ignored for years and will no longer wait in an orderly queue.
The first thing that needs to be made clear at the outset is that there is no such creature as an average farmer. The Sky presentation is very careful to choose visually tame representatives of a sector that is universally misunderstood. Sky’s lead journalist on this reporting, the west of England and Wales correspondent Dan Whitehead, would doubtless agree that despite the rapidly falling numbers of farmers in Britain, there is no such creature as an “average” farmer anywhere in the world.
The industrial world develops and markets a range of specialist vehicles and technology for a sector that has as many solutions for its many technical challenges as it has practitioners. The general public, in Britain and further afield, has no problem synthesising a stereotype notion of a nonexistent rural world. In the process, any suggestion of a viable business model runs counter current to the town dweller’s vision of a rural idyll.
It would not be productive to imagine that rural businesses are complementary to industrial or urban economic structures. Nor can the transport and distribution networks that link urban consumers to an imagined rural hinterland ever ensure that each business gets what it needs in a timely manner.
A frequent town dweller’s notion of a farm is more like a zoo than a production unit. Go back a century or so to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and you encounter a group of anthropocentric livestock: hens, pigs, cattle and heavy horses. Truth to tell, if it ever existed, this diverse community of livestock was a casualty of the first world war. The two million British equine casualties had a greater impact on warfare and industry than the loss of several millions of military personnel or civilians killed in air raids elsewhere. British army officers were required to supply a horse’s front hoof when reporting an equine casualty, whereas they did not need to furnish any such grisly evidence for human casualties among their ranks.
The wartime massacre of draft horses was beyond the breeding capacity of the northern hemisphere and cleared the way for mechanisation in both rural hinterlands and metropolitan centres alike. The British army bought in horses from as far away as North America, but they were ill-suited to military requirements.
Both agriculture and industry have exhibited huge appetites for energy during the past two centuries. The combined effects of converting the plains of North America into a grain exporter on a continental scale. This was accompanied by the relentless westward advance of the railroads through the 1850s and 1860s, hauling wheat back to the east coast and shipping it on to Europe.
The age of steam put bread on the tables of starving cities. It may even have given urban populations a passing curiosity as to where food comes from and what sort of people might produce it. But the only people that ever had contact with producers and consumers were traders with a limited interest beyond crop forecasts and spot prices. It is hardly surprising that during the intervening decades, a parallel web of dreams fed on pictures in books and magazines should inhabit part of the cultural vacuum between town and country.
Dan Whitehead’s rural narrative assembles facets of the agricultural world as a kaleidoscope might do. He starts by talking to Welsh sheep producer Rhodri, who has seen a 40% cut in his income, now shorn of subsidy. He is worried that his school age son will not inherit the family farm.
Outdoor pork producer Jeff laments the supposed passing of the British pig industry. Like many British pig producers, he believes his European counterparts are subsidised as generously as they have ever been. He can’t go into a supermarket without spotting foreign meat: pork chops from Spain, chicken from Poland and Brazil. He can sum up Brexit in one word: “atrocious”. From his farm in Kent, Jeff drove a tractor up London for a city centre protest. Like many in the pig sector, he is adamant that breeders have been thrown under a bus by a government that doesn’t care. “There’s an unfairness in British agriculture,” he argues. Looking at the deals the UK government signed with Australia and New Zealand, he might have a point.
Nearby, fruit grower Tim has built up a strawberry business valued in tens of millions of pounds. He needs a workforce of 2000 to pick thousands of tonnes of strawberries. Most of his recruits are from EU member states. When the UK was in the single market, workers could move freely with no time limits. Now they are limited to six months and have to move on regardless of whether or not they are a net gain or a net drain on their employer. Tim is frustrated because he cannot negotiate prices for his crop from a solid position.
There are plenty of British pig producers who will argue that foreign pigmeat is hindering domestic producers, but the story is a little bit more subtle than that. If British producers could earn a living off the sales of pork loins, they would cheerfully do so. Since loins are used for roasting joints or bacon, there will always be buyers for this cut. This often leads to a situation whereby British loin are sold through for roasting joints. Meeting demand for bacon packers, there is a steady trade in pigs from Dutch and Danish units. These have been raised to British standards for decades and are effectively competing on a level field, even if their British counterparts see it differently. The key to staying in business is referred to as balancing the carcase, ensuring that every saleable part of the carcase is sold. Hams or gammons are straightforward to prepare for the retail market and represent a good return. What British pig breeders often overlook, however, is that they will routinely export forequarters to cutting halls in northern Europe, which have skilled workforces that make short work of the technically challenging forequarters. These are home to the animal’s powerful jaw muscles. If a pig bites your hand, count your fingers as soon as you’ve stemmed the bleeding.
The British government’s plans really are as mad as they sound. Try this example for size:
Fresh produce importer PML Seafrigo runs a private BCP at Lympne, near Dover. Company director Mike Parr picks up the story:
“PML Seafrigo has its own 24/7 border control post at Lympne, which is the closest point of entry to the Port of Dover (closer than Sevington), we have a dedicated transport and logistics hub for imported goods and yet our customers will still be charged the CUC even though they will not be using the Sevington facility.
“The government is effectively asking businesses such as ours to collect taxes on their behalf. And the fact that this fee will be reviewed and updated annually by Defra is itself worrying, it could easily be increased in 12 months’ time.
Parr is outraged by the casual way the government is abusing the trust of the country’s traders.
“The common user charge (CUC) is effectively another business tax that will be applied to each commodity line in a Common Health Entry Document (CHED). Although fees are capped – £145 for every consignment arriving via the Port of Dover or Eurotunnel –this is another expense for importers and retailers to bear, which will of course be reflected in further delays at the ports and another price hike for essential food items.
“What is particularly frustrating is that the fee is being levied for all fresh produce / plants goods passing through Dover or Folkestone – even if they don’t pass through the government controlled inspection post at Sevington.”
The question that most people would want an answer to is “WHY is the British government waging war on the very people that it claims to support? Any ideas, please add as a comment.
British cheese exports to Canada will face duty of 245% next year, once the third country duty-free quota is exhausted. Some 95% of this quota is already taken by products arriving from Norway and Switzerland, leaving very little for shipments to any other third country.
This slap in the face for British cheesemakers comes as Canadian negotiators came amid talks on the implementation of the much-vaunted bilateral trade deal. Refusing to roll over previous extensions to zero percent duty available under former EU terms, the so-called cheese letters, the decision vapourises pre-Brexit claims of extensive growth in UK food exports. These will in fact be treated like any other third country products, in the absence from specific terms agreed during the framework negotiations. Last year, the UK exported cheese worth nearly GBP 19 million to Canada.
Hundreds of acres of cultivable farmland will be cleared to make way for houses as far as the eye can see. In the coming months, Mid Sussex District Council will hear applications from developers wanting to build 1500 houses between the villages of Ansty and Cuckfield. As well as residential properties, there will be shops and amenities in addition to a headline-grabbing 30% allocation of social housing. Whether or not the developments will ever release as much as 30% for social housing remains to be seen, but it needs to be there at the outset..
This major development plan faces problems, however. To begin with the new homes will generate additional demand for water in a part of the world where demand for water is already comparabl;e to desert regions.The loss of 250 acres of farmland is nothing short of disastrous: the UK cannot afford to throw away productive land.
BBC Food Programme editor Sheila Dillon talks to architect Carolyn Steel, author of the book Hungry City. Listen to Carolyn’s commentary as they walk around London on BBC Sounds. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00cly4c
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