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Cheap Meat and Dairy-Produce Cost Too Much
in Subsidies, Bad Farming, Poor Husbandry, Violated Environment,
and Compromised Safety and Welfare.
Customers and retailers have become implicated in a greedy
production of surfeits of falsely cheap food. Now is the time
to expose at the till the true cost of radically reformed
farming and food policies.
Farmers expect the government, with subventions concealing
heavy impositions from taxpayers, to cover the cost of disasters
and disruptions due to bad practices against the consequences
of which they should insure themselves.
Manufacturers have to indemnify themselves and withdraw and
condemn stocks, and meet customers’ claims if contamination
is found in tins of baked beans or cosmetics, or faults occur
in electrical goods; motorists are compelled to take out third-party
cover; householders’ insurance comprehends damage due
to falling roof tiles. Farmers have for too long enjoyed a
special dispensation of responsibility, depending on subsidies
from nannying governments to bail them out of their blunders.
Consumers and retailers have bought cheap and connived at
this national fecklessness. Present and previous crises are
precedented retributions for ruinous farming policies.
The cull of livestock due to foot-and-mouth disease is belittled
by the current plight this lambing season of ewes left to
lamb in unequal conditions described in weather reports as
atrocious and Arctic. Four million lambs will have been lost
by the end of the next few months, aborted, stillborn, and
dying after only a few days from exposure, hunger, and neglect
after birth from enfeebled, undernourished, and overwhelmed
ewes. This ludicrous form of production is a far cry from
the ministrations of the Good Shepherd. Even worse, today’s
flockmasters cultivate subsidies yielding them more than they
raise from sales of meat from consumers unwilling to pay a
realistic price at the till.
Subsidies lavished on bad husbandry and cruelty must be diverted
into rural enhancement, and consumers must face the joined-up
plow-to-plate realities in their choices of wholesome food.
VEGA repeated this week its indictment of the Food Standards
Agency’s lacklustre response to the report of the Phillips
BSE Inquiry and called for radical reforms of farming, release
of pressure on production and consumption of treacherous foodstuffs,
and return to the Exchequer of some of the sums squandered
in handouts to a rotten and dying industry.
Free-range, organic, and farm-assured will not cure the problems;
more small slaughterhouses will not eradicate the wheeling
and dealing in markets and auctions – ideal conditions
for transmissions of disease in distressed and exhausted animals.
VAT or a sales tax is applied variably and differentially
in most European countries and in the USA, at rates from 4%
to 25%. The UK is one of the few where it is set at zero percent.
VEGA’s proposals have sound precedents. An imposition
on animal-derived foods would benefit the diet and emphasize
the value of the elements the Government commends as health-promoting
factors. Reduced consumption from funny pharming would help
to restore standards in agriculture and care of the countryside.
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