Last month, Defra announced a u-turn on controversial plans which would have seen the mandatory introduction of animal welfare labelling for food products. The move follows heavy criticism from industry, including organisations such as the FUW.
In essence, the proposals would have related welfare outcomes to the method of production and, according to Defra, would have given consumers ‘greater clarity’ about the welfare standard of the product.
The FUW sent a lengthy and condemnatory response to the 2021 Defra call for evidence on this issue. In its extremely critical response, the union stated that the system proposed would either be too crude to produce any meaningful information to consumers or too complex to enable informed purchasing by all but the most fastidious of information seekers.
The FUW must welcome this move as a commonsense approach which recognises the existing high standards of care given to livestock in Wales.
Despite assertions in the consultation that welfare labelling will produce better returns for producers, the FUW is yet to see any evidence on this assumption and would argue that there appears to be little loyalty to support assured produce if cheaper alternatives can be sourced. The premise that the changes proposed would somehow increase high welfare purchases is fundamentally flawed and without any sociological basis.
A formal consultation was expected in the Spring but Defra now states that it is ‘not the right time’ to launch the consultation.
The union was especially appalled to see a linkage between disease status and welfare being put forward within this consultation. The union responded by stating that it was incredibly dangerous, reckless and imprudent to suggest a welfare labelling system based on prevalence of disease. Indeed, proposals to link welfare labelling to disease status could cause livestock keepers to be less inclined to seek out testing for subclinical or asymptomatic infections for fear of detrimentally affecting their welfare labelling status.
The conflicting nature of the proposals is evidenced by the fact that millions of UK eggs temporarily lost their free-range status during the 2017 Avian Influenza H5N8 outbreak. At the time, EU legislation only allowed for a 12 week derogation for free-range birds if they were required to be housed by law under a Prevention Zone. When the housing period was extended beyond this point then the free-range status of eggs and poultry was lost. Rather than being labelled free range, eggs were printed with a ‘2’ and labelled as ‘barn’. In some cases, producers meeting strict criteria were allowed to let their flocks outside and this created an asymmetric playing field - effectively a ‘postcode lottery’ - which disadvantaged those remaining producers required to maintain indoor housing. The costs for staffing and land remained the same but, under proposals designed to minimise disease outbreaks, the product was devalued and the returns from the market potentially diminished. Indeed, labelling and regulation surpassed and outperformed both commonsense and disease prevention in this case.
The FUW also used the opportunity to reiterate that current trade deals have left domestic producers vulnerable by allowing UK consumers to access cheaper, lower standard, products at a time when the health and welfare standards of domestic produce continue to be raised at a regulatory level.
The FUW supports moves to mandatorily identify when imported food products do not meet the minimum baseline UK welfare regulations. Recent trade deals have led union members to believe that the government is content to ‘offshore’ welfare issues. The FUW oppose policies in which domestic producers are forced to operate under the hypocrisy of ever increasing domestic health, welfare and environmental standards whilst the home market is open to imports produced to far lower standards.
Rather than the industry having to bear yet more costs and regulation, the FUW would like to see more effort within the supply chain educating consumers about the high welfare standards already inherent in GB food production. More work is required to foster consumer confidence, correct malicious or uneducated falsehoods and promote the hard work and dedication of family farms in Wales.
Alongside such work, the FUW would prefer to see more effort being made to educate consumers about the meaning of current high welfare domestic labels in order to improve willingness to pay for domestic produce over cheaper imported alternatives. This would be a much simpler, cheaper and more effective way of achieving the desired outcomes in the consultation.