Pessimism, promises and poultry: Andrew Livingston asks if 2025’s lofty food and farming goals may already be slipping through our fingers
When you return to work in January – not that farmers ever really stop… – you can soon forget that it is a shiny, fresh new year. The festivities get left behind, New Years’ resolutions begin to get dusty and forgotten and we all slowly return to just getting on with our lives. My own healthy eating plan has already gone out of the window, but I’m still (mostly) dry for January!
For the poultry industry, 2025 is supposed to be a big year. Many of the major retailers made a promise in 2016 – the question is, will they keep it?
Nine years ago, Aldi, ASDA, Iceland, Lidl, Morrisons and Tesco all stated that at the end of 2025, all the whole eggs sold in their stores would be from cage-free birds. It’s a promise which is looking very unlikely to be kept … it’s all gone a bit too quiet.
Hats off to M&S who have only sold free-range eggs since 2002, and Waitrose hasn’t sold any caged eggs since 2001.
The promise was made in what was frankly a completely different world: pre-pandemic, pre-inflation, pre-war in Ukraine and pre-bird flu. Each of these have put great strain on the industry.
While the volume of free-range eggs sold in the UK went up another 7.8 per cent last year, 22 per cent of all the eggs sold in the second quarter of last year were raised in colony cages: that’s around 220 million dozen a year.
Colony cages replaced the old battery cage system in 2012, and on average a colony cage holds 80 hens. It has a screened-off area for laying, a scratch mat and low perches. Hens don’t leave the cage until they go to slaughter.
I will be interested to see the public’s reaction if the 2016 promise isn’t kept … though I doubt that the public really cares. Most of the public wouldn’t know the difference between caged or barn-kept birds, or even what organic really means.
The reaction will be interesting nonetheless, as there are bigger promises to be broken in the near future. The NFU pledged five years ago that UK farms would be carbon neutral by 2040. A quarter of the time has gone and little progress has been made.
I hate to be nihilistic, and I know it’s important, but … Donald Trump is back in America and far-right movements are gaining power across Europe. Are we wasting our time on the climate change debate?
Please don’t think that I am a climate change denier (don’t come for me, I wash my plastics). I just worry that we are going to be one of the only countries banging the Net Zero drum while everyone else prioritises other matters.
I’ve done it again. I’ve gone all pessimistic. All I’ll say is, looking at the current global situation and the history of the last five years, should we concentrate on our food security rather than climate change? Or should we be concentrating on animal welfare rather than food security?
It’s a moral dilemma and I don’t have an answer. It’s a Venn diagram of a multitude of factors and we need to find the sweet spot in the middle. I don’t know where that sweet spot is, but I do know we aren’t there yet.
Planning officers need to start granting permission for chicken sheds to grow the nation’s free-range flock … without them, we’ll never stop selling caged eggs on our supermarket shelves.
Sorry. Nihilistic, pessimistic, depressing… Happy 2025! I need a stiff drink after all that. I suspect my Dry January is about to get a little wet.
