Across this website, readers will have seen posts such as butter by numbers or cheese by numbers. The purpose is not spelt out in these posts, so here is the thinking behind the “by numbers” coverage.
First, most of the figures cited go back to the end of the 20th century and are volume measurements. The choice of tonnages over the more usual measurement of currency is intended to give an idea of the additional capacity that imports generate for their economies.
In its simplest terms, importing food occupies production capacity the exporting country cannot use for the local economy. For countries like New Zealand, rural populations are so sparse and urban populations are so far apart that this is not a problem.
Market gardeners close to urban centres in countries such as Kenya, on the other hand, can find themselves left with crops of green beans for which they have no local outlet. Having promised to grow premium vegetables for affluent industrial economies, there is no wriggle room for producers if retail customers change their minds.
By looking at tonnages, it becomes possible to calculate the agricultural resources that are occupied by export production.
The use of data going back to the late 1990s is a reflection of the fact that multiple retailers invested heavily in electronic point of sale and data management for food sales during the early 1990s. The later years of the 1990s mark the moment that the results started to become visible.
A cow producing 5000 litres of milk in a lactation (a lot by the standards of the 1990s) would give enough cream for two and a half tonnes of butter. Converting the remaining output into skim milk powder (SMP) would add a further couple of tonnes of powdered milk to the final output. There are other ways of splitting up milk fractions, some of them with limited use and application. Some standard variables appear in the first table, while the second outlines UK butter import tonnages for packet butter (retail product) and bulk butter for 1996-8, when the Common Agricultural policy was in full swing.
Taking the 1998 total packet butter imports total of just over 20,000 tonnes and when the total is divided by 2.5 (tonnes per lactation) it becomes clear that you will need at least 8,000 lactations — or lactating cows — to generate this tonnage. Bulk butter imports for that year topped 66,000 tonnes, needing a further 24,000 cows. Figures on this scale pose two serious questions.
First, is the UK economy capable of generating sufficient demand to increase domestic production by a comparable tonnage? Second, where would the UK accommodate an additional 30,000 dairy cows and the same number of calves that would trigger the necessary lactations? The chances are that the UK economy is not vigorous enough to generate investments in domestic production on that sort of scale. It is equally probable that the UK landscape would not absorb thousands of additional cattle and their calves.
The attraction of imported stock such as bulk butter is that it can be diverted into seasonal products like mince pies, which are planned into shifts after Easter and stored in a freezer until needed in the run-up to Christmas. Energy prices have made this pattern uneconomic this year, but it was a successful venture in previous years.
Butter comprises 80% cream and is transported in a refrigerated system. If there is no refrigeration, butter can be clarified. The process removes the water and heat sensitive protein, turning it into ghee. This can be kept in hot climates at ambient temperatures.
Milk is around 90% water, so it makes sense to stabilise it as butter or cheese or milk powder before trying to move it anywhere. A good example would be New Zealand, which has a network of butter/skim milk powder plants, where milk is centrifuged to extract the cream. This is made into butter, while the remaining skimmed milk goes to a drying tower and leaves as skim milk powder (SMP).
The UK has a tradition of marketing its milk as liquid milk, which is either pasteurised, sterilised or put through an Ultrahigh Heat Treatment (UHT) line. UHT cartons will have a life of around a year at ambient temperatures, sterilised milk should be protected from the light, but will last indefinitely in unopened bottles.
Using a centrifuge, milk for pasteurisation or UHT lines will be standardised at 4% or 2% or zero percent for full cream; semi-skim or skim respectively. Surplus cream is usually collected in a tank for sale on the industrial market. A milk packing plant can quite easily generate a tanker load during the course of a week, for most of the year, with the exception of a Christmas peak in UK sales of cream. Before Brexit, tanker loads would often travel as far as Germany and be a viable proposition.
All milk for powder making must be centrifuged before it goes through the drying tower. Any remaining cream or protein would block the fine nozzles used to spray the milk into a rising column of hot air. The fat-free Skim Milk Powder is collected from the bottom of the tower.The fat content is restored if there is a need for Whole Milk Powder or a custom formulation for food manufacture or baby foods.
When you come to realise that milk is made up of water — 90 percent or more — it becomes clear that it needs to be turned into something a bit more user-friendly to be transportable. Making cheese has routinely been a convenient way of stabilising fragile milk and preparing it for a longer journey to its end user. Milk proteins will be retained and a proportion of the cream will be either removed or additional cream will be added, depending on the recipe. Cheddaring cheese is basically a technique for extending the working life of milk, using the existing solids. The progression is laid out in the table below.
Having made curd with the milk, there is inevitably some loss of the finely divided protein particles that are retained in the whey. The whey was traditionally fed to pigs, which is why the history of livestock farming in Denmark was so closely integrated. A significant component of Danish bacon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries started out as whey from cheesemaking.
Depending on the density of grazing livestock — the example here assumes 20 lactating cows to the hectare — there will always be a certain amount of agricultural land that will be blocked from local use by the commitment to export the production it supports. This is a topic to which we will return. For now, it is sufficient to assume that dairy producers will need three lactations (integer values) for every tonne of milk solids that are recovered and transferred into cheesemaking. In addition, there will be a need for three twentieths of a hectare of grazing land to meet the Livestock Unit level in this model.
There is a greater diversity among cheeses, reflecting their moisture content and how the whey is removed during the cheesemaking process. As a cheese ages, it will go from being a crumbly wet curd and solidify into increasingly dense cheeses. Whole cheeses are matured for up to two years in the case of hard cheeses like parmesan or Grana Padana, a year or more for mature grades of Cheddar, to just six weeks for soft cheesses like Camembert or Brie. The protein can be more or less elastic, depending on how much heat has been applied to the curd and other factors in the process.
“Today, we have come to sell our produce for a fair price,” declares Gérard Ricardi. The secretary general of radical farmers’ union MODEF (MOuvement pour la Défence des Exploitants Familiaux) has plenty of takers for tomatoes at EUR 1.50/kilo outside the mairie [town hall] of Ivry sur Seine on a blazing hot morning in late August.
The supermarkets pay around 45 centimes/kilo for tomatoes that cost 70 centimes/kilo to grow, Ricardi explains. There is 20 centimes/kilo to find for transport and packaging, before the same tomatoes are sold in Paris for EUR 2.50/kilo.
“Prices like that are a racket,” he grumbles. “Here, the growers are earning 70 centimes/kilo, there’s 20 centimes/kilo freight and packing, with 60 centimes for the distributor.” Total EUR 1.50/kg.
“We want to make it clear that there is scope for everyone to earn a living. The state should face up to its responsibilities and support consumers and growers alike.”
Sixty years ago, the French state imposed a maximum retail margin on agricultural products. “The state recognised then that retailers were overcharging and took action to stop the abuse.”
Known as the coefficient multiplicateur, retailers were able to multiply their cost prices by a factor of between 1.5 and 1.7, but no more. “The grocers were just lining their pockets, but it was not acceptable then in the way it is now.”
In fact, this policy had two important benefits: “Consumer prices were lower, because prices were linked to growers’ production costs and growers received a fair return for their work,” Ricardi observes.
“There was even a shared interest for retailers to pay more to the producer, so that the retail price could be higher. It was a virtuous circle that worked for consumers and producers, too.”
The coefficient multiplicateur lasted until 1986, when the retail lobby finally managed to kill it off. In recent years, a watered-down form of the coefficient multiplicateur returned to the Code de l’Agriculture as an emergency measure, but it has never been implemented because there is simply no political will to question the integrity of multiple retailers.
MODEF is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. MODEF was founded to stand up for small family farmers at a time when the mainstream farming unions would have cheerfully excluded six million peasants from the political process. Today, the largest union FNSEA uses the word paysan (peasant) to pluck the heartstrings of a nation that has very varied notions of a time before industrial farming, which should somehow have been better than today but probably was not.
Against all the odds, MODEF is still fighting the same assumptions in harder times. There are fewer peasants – just under half a million – but the growing power of a handful of multiple retailers has become a stranglehold on the nation’s food supply.
“We are disappearing and the head of state takes us for a bunch of idiots,” growls Girardi. Around him are crates of nectarines, plums and melons, fruit on which supermarkets earn similar margins to the tomato bonanza he described above.
“They’re buying my potatoes for 5 centimes a kilo,” another producer chips in. “They cost me 20 centimes a kilo to grow.”
As he speaks, just 100 metres away a French-owned discount grocery chain is selling 2.5 kilos of potatoes in a net for EUR 2.99. At 13 locations around Paris, there are queues to buy MODEF-produced potatoes priced at EUR 4 for a 5 kilo net.
The previous night, the growers had loaded an articulated lorry with tonnes of potatoes, melons, tomatoes, nectarines, plums and salad grown in Lot-et-Garonne before driving to the French capital to sell directly to Parisian consumers. Not that the public needed a lot of convincing.
The prices speak for themselves: two lettuces for EUR 1, compared to EUR 0.99 for a single lettuce in the same French discounter, while MODEF nectarines were priced at EUR 2/kilo against the retailer’s EUR 2.29/kilo.
At a local shopping centre a bit further away, Spanish grade II tomatoes are being sold in a larger supermarket for EUR 1.09/kilo. MODEF growers are not alone in resenting the kind of market distortion that arises from a European directive that has allowed countries such as Germany and Spain to exploit cheap foreign labour and undercut growers elsewhere in the European Union.
“The Bolkenstein directive must be revoked as a matter of urgency,” says MEP Patrick Le Hyaric, who was present at Ivry sur Seine. “This directive has allowed Spanish growers to take on Moroccan farm labourers and pay them less than the minimum European salaries,” he declared.
As a member of the European parliamentary commission for agriculture, he had just returned from Lot-et-Garonne where he had met a delegation of fresh produce growers, some of whom were on the same improvised market square at Ivry sur Seine. “I knew the situation was difficult, but now I have a better idea of the scale of the crisis that is gripping the small and medium-sized holdings in this sector.”
Over the past 20 years, Lot-et-Garonne has already seen a lot of growers go out of business. “Today, those that remain do not know if they will still be standing in six months’ time,” warns Le Hyaric.
He is organising an urgent meeting with the French minister for food, farming and fisheries, Bruno Le Maire, to demand emergency aid packages for growers and the urgent implementation of the coefficient multiplicateur. This is available as a crisis measure but has been studiously avoided by the French government.
“In its present form, the Common Agricultural Policy has a number of negative effects. But in its original form, it was a sound piece of policy. The préférence communautaire was not a bad idea, it just did not fit in with ultra-liberal ideas or the so-called ‘free market’, that is all.
“So Europe gave in to US demands. And now, for instance, France is completely dependent on imported soya to feed its livestock, most of it from Brazil.”
As long as cheap food imports can be procured around the world, consumers in the industrial world can get by without small, local food producers. But abandoning an entire sector of the economy has a cost that should be neither underestimated nor trivialised.
It is neither a secret nor is it difficult to understand. Talk to anyone who sells food direct: just don’t leave it too long.
We are told by industry sources that there are more than 1,900 species of edible insects. There is no simple way of checking this figure or defining what is considered edible or not… Despite having such a broad palette to choose from, most manufacturers go for three easily recognisable species: mealworms, crickets and grasshoppers. In keeping with the crunchy post-processing state of the insects, it is hardly surprising that there are lots of crispy snack products to choose from. Good news for the squeamish: insect products will keep for about a year in a cupboard, longer if the contents are clearly labelled. The allergy risks are similar to those encountered with shellfish and the pack sizes are modest. Insects are good value for money, though. You can extract 60g of protein from 100g of insects, whereas you would have 55g from 100g of beef. There are environmental discussions to be had about insects, too. Smaller environmental footprint, rapid source of protein and traceable with it. Hmm…
In 1934, the Ministry of Agriculture published a recipe collection based on ingredients produced to National Mark standards, a fundamentally flawed quality assurance scheme overseen by the ministry. In 1936, the ministry went on to publish a second National Mark booklet with a year’s worth of recipes and product information, couched in the most toe-curling and sexist language imaginable.
The National Mark Calendar of Cooking is a 128-page stapled booklet, published in 1936. It contained recipes compiled by cookery correspondent of the News Chronicle, Ambrose Heath and Good Housekeeping Institute director Mrs D D Cottington Taylor.
It addressed an affluent upper class readership, heaping unstinting praise on British-grown food and overlooking the fact that the UK depended — and still does in large measure — on imported food. As the rest of Europe prepared for war, the National Mark Calendar warbled and wittered on endlessly about products that were only available to a rich elite.
Recipes for June include such gems as semolina souflee and poached eggs in aspic.The souflee recipe gives instructions for cooking the dish in a hot oven or a steamer, should a suitable oven be unavailable.
European food retailer Tesco has group sales of more than GBP 50 billion and saw its profitability soar by nearly 60%. The group is active in eastern Europe as well as the UK, where it operates convenience buying group and wholesaler Booker foods in addition to the ubiquitous supermarkets. Here are a few headline figures from its annual report.
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To give an idea of the scale of these results, the 2021 GDP of Rwanda was 11.7 billion USD.
With household budgets increasingly under pressure, cheaper options are under constant review. There is a case to be made for arguing that the fixed costs of running a canning line or a filling line is much the same regardless of the price of the finished product. But the variations that can arise from the quality of the ingredients remain significant.
Sometime referred to as “fighting brands”, cheap canned goods with obscure branding are planned into quiet moments of the production schedule, taking up the slack towards the end of a tomato season, for instance. Recognisable from their lightweight tinplate-lined cans, the fighting brands are very unlikely to be fitted with ring pulls.
Branded goods are judged on the quality of the finished product, for which we expect to pay more. Fighting brands will find ways of extending the product, which represents a greater share of the final price.
When trying to save money while shopping for food, stating the blindingly obvious is not going to go down well. Food and farming minister George Eustice (pictured) take note. For those who frequent the supermarket aisles at regular intervals, there is no need for well-paid MPs to chip in with their two pennyworth, as reported in The Guardian this week. Supermarket shelves are laid out to make it easy to spot cheap products, so advising shoppers to consider cheaper fighting brands is unnecessary. Just saying that simply trading down will enable shoppers to “…contain and manage their household budget…” is rubbing salt into the wounds. Possibly more damaging to his ministerial credibility was Eustice’s assertion that the UK has a “…very competitive retail market with 10 big supermarkets…” resulting in “…a lot of competition to keep prices down.” Since all retailers face open-ended rises in energy and haulage costs, food is not about to get any cheaper. And that is before phasing in veterinary certificates and the cost of food safety checks on imported animal products.