Defra agrees to host pig industry crisis summit

The UK government has agreed to host an emergency summit in a bid to find solutions to the worsening crisis in the pig industry.

Defra farm minister Victoria Prentis has accepted the request from the NFU and the National Pig Association (NPA) to convene a roundtable event to discuss the crisis.

NFU president Minette Batters and NPA chairman Rob Mutimer wrote to Defra secretary George Eustice on 21 January, urging him to “arrange a summit of the entire pig supply chain so that we can agree a plan to get these pigs off farms and on to people’s plates”.

See also: Pig producers given three months to complete welfare course

In response, Mrs Prentis said agreed that “convening a roundtable bringing together producers, processors, and retailers to discuss the ongoing challenges faced by the sector would be helpful”.

The date will be arranged shortly.

Mrs Prentis acknowledged that recruitment of butchers via the temporary visa route, which closed to new applications on 31 December, had “taken longer than initially expected”, but said processors could still recruit butchers via the new points-based immigration system, introduced in January 2021.

The NPA said it was aware of only 105 butchers that have arrived, or are due to arrive, using the government’s seasonal visa scheme, which has a maximum allowance of 800 visas.

Mrs Prentis acknowledged that uptake of the Private Storage Aid (PSA) scheme, which will subsidise storage costs for up to six months, and Slaughter Incentive Payment (SIP) 2022 scheme, which offers cash incentives to processors to slaughter additional pigs to relieve the backlog on farms, has been lower than anticipated.

But Mrs Prentis believes the extensions and changes to the schemes, if taken up by the processors, “will help to further reduce the current backlog of pigs on farm”.

Welcome news

Mr Mutimer, who runs a 750-sow outdoor unit with his wife Helen in Swannington, Norfolk, welcomed news of confirmation of the emergency summit.

“We desperately need to get everyone together, so we can explain just how serious things are on farm – many people are now utterly desperate – and to try and find urgent solutions to get things moving, and also to share the burden of all this more evenly,” he said.

“The current projection is that if things don’t change, we are not going to start seriously eating into the backlog until late spring or early summer.

“That, I’m afraid, will simply be too late for many pig farmers. This is a crisis unfolding in front of our eyes – and we must act collectively now to save the British pig industry.”

The Standard Pig Price (SPP), the average price for GB standard pigs, fell nearly a penny to 137.87p/kg last week, putting it back at the level last seen at the beginning of 2019.

Around 170,000 pigs are still backlogged on UK farms due to a shortage of butchers caused by Covid-19 and Brexit. Pig producers are losing about £25 per pig, according to the NPA, due to record pig feed costs and falling prices.