Fair Deal Food

As fuel and fertiliser costs soar, farmers get only a tiny share of the retail price for their produce

VIDEO: Egg shortage due to unfair supermarket prices – not avian flu: Farmers Guardian, subscribers only

Farmers Weekly reports that food and farming groups are dismayed at the wafer-thin margins left for primary producers once everyone else in the food chain has taken their share of the cash.

A new report from food and farming alliance Sustain, Unpicking Food Prices has considered a range of products commonly found on supermarket shelves and examined where the available profit goes.

Two examples: a pack of four beefburgers with a retail value of £3.50 only returns a net profit of 8.7p, the researchers estimate, while a block of Cheddar cheese, worth £2.50, generates just 3.5p in profit.

While average retail prices have risen from £2.05/kg in 2017 to £2.20/kg in 2022, farmgate returns have slumped from 60p/kg to 40p/kg over the same five-year period

But the lion’s share is kept by the retailer with farmers left to pick up the crumbs – just 0.1p from the burgers and 0.05p from the Cheddar cheese.

Head of sustainable farming at Sustain, Vicki Hird, says this demonstrates the imbalance in the food supply chain “Farmers hold a disproportionately high amount of the risk when it comes to producing food, but receive a disproportionately low amount of the reward, reflecting their relative weakness in the supply chain.”

Ms Hird should contact Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, former chief of MI5 the country’s security service, who says that security of food supplies would fit within the government’s own definition of national security. She believed this meant strengthening domestic supply (FT):

“Several people [have] said that [food security] was about just getting a secure food line from somewhere else . . . I’ve interpreted it differently.

“We have a hope that we will continue to get food from our nearest neighbours as we get energy from them . . . The more we can be self-sufficient, the better chances we have of withstanding price hikes, spikes, shocks and so on — and politics.”

The NFU today focussed only on the price of inputs and the need to import labour but they, the government and the former chief of MI5 need to become aware of the risk to food security posed by low returns from supermarkets as farmers’ costs soar.

[…]

Via https://fairdealfooduk.wordpress.com/2022/12/06/threats-to-food-security-from-the-farming-press-a-farmers-union-and-the-former-head-of-mi5/