by Jay Rayner
The consumer response was all but instantaneous. Even in Britain, where nobody had died, and where the only people who had contracted the illness had visited Germany, sales of cucumbers simply halted, regardless of where they had come from. Health officials in Britain tried to reassure the public that the cucumbers on sale here were safe; even so a glut built up and tonnes had to be dumped. (So much so that on Friday 10 June I found myself interviewing chef Jamie Oliver live on BBC1’s The One Show about the best way to use up cucumbers. He demonstrated a killer twelve-hour pickling recipe.)
In time the German authorities would absolve the innocent cucumbers of blame. Attention would shift swiftly to a bean-sprout farm in Lower Saxony, and from there back down the food chain to a 15,000-kilogram consignment of seeds that had left the port of Damietta in Egypt almost two years earlier on 24 November 2009. But by then the damage had been done. German consumers hadn’t simply turned against cucumbers or even just salad vegetables in general. They had pretty much started boycotting all produce from Spain. What had begun with the death of one octogenarian German lady would, by the middle of that summer, have become a full-blown political and economic crisis, with the Spanish authorities estimating that it had cost Spain’s agriculture sector over a quarter of a billion dollars.
And that’s where it became a problem for Peter Kedge.
Because among the produce Spanish farmers could no longer sell to the Germans were plums. An enormous number of cricket-ball-sized, blemish-free, sun-ripened plums. For the Spanish farmers this was, as it happened, not much of a problem. In Britain farmers generally don’t get paid in full for their produce until the supermarkets take delivery, a major issue we will come to later. In Spain, however, the agents, who act as middlemen, pay for the plums before they’re harvested, and then profit when they finally sell on. In Spain there was now a major glut of plums which the agents had to find some way to sell, in a manner which might literally cut their losses. What they needed were customers, and in the British supermarkets that was exactly what they found.
‘It was just as we were about to harvest,’ Peter Kedge says. ‘All of a sudden we got a message from our agents telling us the supermarkets we normally supply had decided to bring in foreign plums.’ It didn’t matter that the orchards of Kent were bulging with the things, that Britain has an ancient and venerable plum-growing history, or that for years a debate had been growing around the importance of sourcing local produce where possible to cut down on food miles. The supermarkets were going to follow the money. British growers estimated that they had to sell each punnet of plums to the supermarkets at 65p to break even. Spanish agents were offering their plums at 45p a punnet, simply to get them moving. ‘We couldn’t pick and pack our plums for that money.’
And so Kedge did the one thing which to him made any economic sense. ‘We decided not to pick them all, to just leave a significant amount to rot in the orchards.’ Dozens of tonnes of perfect British plums fell from the trees and decayed where they lay, until the air in the orchards was heavy with the boozy smell of rotting fruit and they buzzed with the sound of happy fruit flies. ‘It’s hard to describe what it’s like watching your harvest literally go to waste,’ Kedge said. ‘It’s horrible. There’s nothing worse.’
Peter Kedge’s family originally planted fifty acres of plum orchards back in 1999. Over the years, as supermarkets’ buying policies had bitten hard, that had been reduced to thirty-five acres, as trees were ‘grubbed out’. In the wake of the disaster of 2011 the farmer once again made plans to grub out trees – to destroy the capacity of his orchards. It was, according to the National Farmers Union (NFU), a story repeated across Britain: tonne after tonne of perfect plums left to rot, prime trees cut down, orchards emptied.
This is one of the complications of the fruit-growing business. If you are in arable crops – wheat or barley or maize or rapeseed – you can follow the ups and downs of supply and demand, changing your crop from one year to the next depending upon who wants what. Fruit farmers can’t do that. ‘Planting a plum tree is a major investment,’ Kedge says. ‘It takes about six years from initial planting to recoup the investment. And after that you might have another ten years in which to make money.’ The killing of trees simply ends that story. A little bit more of Britain’s ability to feed itself also dies.
The brutal, clear-eyed, wake up and smell the prime, Grade A, dark roast Taste the Extra Special Finest Difference coffee is: this is just business. This is what supermarkets do. Complaining about a supermarket chasing the cheapest price is like wandering into a brothel and complaining about all the shagging going on in there. And it’s true, up to a point. These corporate behemoths have shareholders to think about and profits to make. In the short term that is exactly what they do, and they do it extraordinarily well. Tesco made £1.9 billion in the first six months of 2011, up 12.1 per cent on the previous year. Sainsbury’s made £395 million, up 6.6 per cent. Asda made £803 million, and that was a drop of over 10 per cent. But there is a bigger, dirtier picture. The business of food supply is full of consequences, and some of them are very serious indeed.
Consider the dodo. A butcher trading in prime dodo meat – such lovely animals, all free-range, look at the drumsticks on that – would have been laughing all the way to the bank in 1620. He would have had access to all the dodo he could possibly want. By 1681, however, when the last dodo was killed by the last scurvy-ridden Dutch sailor to feed himself, it might not have looked like such a smart business model. Right now it feels like the big supermarkets are in the dodo extinction business.
The buyers drive such hard bargains, under such extraordinarily unfair terms, that British farming is being decimated. (And the way is being opened to fraud. The scandal around horsemeat being found in processed food products labelled as beef, which first broke across Britain and then Europe in January of 2013, was attributed by many to pressures on price. With beef at an all time high of £2.75 a kilo deadweight on the international markets and horsemeat at around £1.85, the substitution by unscrupulous traders made economic sense in the face of profit margins cut to the bone by supermarket buyers.) In the summer of 2011 food journalist Alex Renton tried to get farmers to talk, on the record, about their dealings with the supermarkets. Most of them refused. They demanded anonymity. They insisted upon off-the-record briefings. Whilst they are obviously lawful companies, the supermarkets did come across less as food retailers and more like mafias, hell-bent on extortion. Anybody who has done business with them might not think the comparison over-blown: the supermarkets would insist upon legally binding contracts that would tie producers into supplying them, but without a specified price. The supermarkets could, with little or no warning, simply reject a consignment of produce, insisting it didn’t hit quality thresholds. The producers would be required to carry the cost of any two-for-one and discounting offers. They would have to get their harvests packaged at plants designated by the supermarkets, often at twice the price it might cost to get the job done independently. (In June 2011 Peter Kendall, chairman of the NFU, told a parliamentary committee that some of these packers and processors pay a portion of the premium extracted from the farmers to the very supermarkets who had enforced the extra charge, as a kind of kickback.)
Most of all there is the issue of price. The best-known sector of British farming to suffer is dairy. Not long ago I spent a day working on a dairy farm in Cornwall. It’s not easy. I got up at four o’clock in the morning, which surely must be regarded as cruel and unusual punishment in itself. I did so, merely so I could stand in a cow shed and dodge plumes of steaming shite being fired out of big animals under pressure. A lot of the job seems to involve shit – dodging it, hosing it off, scraping it up. I weaved my way around the stamping, clanking hooves to wipe down teats with disinfectant. I felt the suck and pull of the automated milking system as the rubber plugs went on. I washed floors, scraped yards, piled hay, interacted with more shit, and then gave thanks to the gods that my day job mostly invol
ves sitting at tables, either eating or writing about what I’ve eaten or feeling smug about what I’ve written about what I’ve eaten while wondering what I’ll eat next.
For all this – the brutal, grinding hard labour of milk production – the supermarkets were at that point willing to pay, through their intermediaries, the princely sum of 25p a litre. The cost of producing milk is around 27p a litre. It’s not a brilliant business model, is it? It’s not even on nodding terms with a brilliant business model. The majority of dairy farmers had, courtesy of supermarket buying policies, been sentenced to make a loss on every litre of milk they sold. The farmer who let me onto his farm as the worst work-experience student in world history said he hoped they might make enough to keep their heads above water by renting out holiday accommodation or selling the calves from their herd for beef. In short, the only way he might make money as a producer of milk was not by producing milk at all, but from other things.
Having spent that day working on a traditional dairy farm, to me it was no surprise at all that one dairy farmer was leaving the industry every week, simply because they couldn’t make it pay. Obviously, a lot of farmers do what they do because they love it. There are easier ways to make money, most of which don’t involve close proximity to animal faeces. But eventually even that sort of loving relationship can get dysfunctional, especially when it occurs to you that you’re not making money any more. Britain, a country full of green grassy fields, a place that could hardly have been more expertly engineered for grazing cows and producing milk, was losing its capacity to do so. At the peak of milk production in Britain, in 2001, there were, according to DairyCo, which represents British dairy farmers, 2.25 million cows producing five billion litres of milk a year, but their numbers were dwindling, down to 1.8 million cows in 2012. We had always been self-sufficient in liquid milk and yet by 2010 we were finally having to import the stuff from elsewhere to top up our own supply.
It’s the same story in a branch of farming which is close to my animal-fat-drenched heart: pigs. It’s close to my heart because I very much like eating them. A couple of years ago, pig farmers took out full-page newspaper adverts announcing that they were being paid less by the supermarkets than the cost of production for their animals. As a result, like dairy farmers, pig farmers were simply giving up. Jamie Oliver dedicated a whole hour of (distinctly unsexy) television to the problem. It had a snappy title, Save Our Bacon, but came down to sixty minutes of stolid, grumpy, whingeing farmers. And who wants to watch that? In any case the supermarkets really didn’t regard this as such a huge problem because they could buy in from elsewhere – Denmark, for example, or the Netherlands – where animal welfare standards are much lower. In this country it’s illegal to put sows in tightly confined stalls, which make it impossible for them to move around while they wean their litters. On the continent the practices continue. BPEX, the body which represents British pig producers, estimates that two-thirds of the imported pork and pork products consumed in Britain are produced in conditions that would be illegal in this country.
And yet, because of the power of the supermarkets, the industry seems incapable of mounting anything other than the most feeble of fightbacks. In the autumn of 2011 I was approached by BPEX to see if I would front a campaign for them. They wanted consumers to sign up to take a pledge, committing themselves only to buying pork which carried the British red tractor label. If you stick to that simple rule then you know that the meat you are eating has been raised under higher welfare standards. It sounded like a good campaign. After all, I had been arguing for exactly this for a while. Plus the campaign was on behalf of a trade body rather than a specific producer, so it wasn’t a product endorsement. We agreed a fee. We discussed what they wanted me to do: photo calls, a series of media interviews, lending my name and image to the campaign. All fine and dandy. It’s rather agreeable to be paid to say what you have already been saying for free.
There was just one thing. Obviously, getting consumers to buy the right kind of pork is important. It’s vital. But I had to be able to say during the interviews that the supermarkets also had a massive responsibility to pay British pork producers a viable price for their meat, and to support British producers so that they stopped going out of business. So that, in turn, the supermarkets didn’t have an excuse to import the stuff from animals tortured on the continent.
The PR company started wringing their hands. ‘You are right,’ they said, in response to my email, ‘supermarkets are part of the issue because the price paid to farmers is not reflective of the conditions in which farmers work and the cost of raising pigs in the UK versus abroad because of the higher welfare standards. However, BPEX is working with the supermarkets to lobby on the issues and we can’t be seen to rock the boat. Therefore we are utilizing customers to create demand.’ Great. Put it all back on the punters and let the supermarkets off the hook.
I said it was a deal breaker. I said that I had to be able to talk about the supermarkets. The PR people went silent for twenty-four hours and then announced that they had, after much thought, decided to go with a different person altogether. Funny that.
Witness the power of the supermarkets.
Witness it in numbers. By the mid-nineties, if you added up everything Britain grew and exported – British seafood and beef have always been big sellers, for example – against everything the country imported, it was over 70 per cent self-sufficient in food. By 2011 British self-sufficiency had dropped, according to figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), to around 58 per cent and there were many in the food policy world who believed that it was much lower than that; that we were slipping inexorably towards a point where we could supply barely 50 per cent of our food needs. And all because the damned evil supermarkets had undermined the British agricultural base.
What’s more, they had been given British government encouragement to do so. In a Defra paper published in December 2006, the government’s position on food security was articulated thus: ‘Poverty and subsistence agriculture are root causes of national food insecurity. National food security is hugely more relevant for developing countries than the rich countries of Western Europe.’ In short, all that really mattered was free trade, and access to foodstuffs from wherever they might be available across our fecund globe.
In academic food policy circles, within universities and institutes, this paper was nicknamed the ‘Leave it to Tesco’ report. Food security wasn’t an issue for the rich, industrialized nations. We had big fat wallets. We could always buy our way out of trouble. So stop whining and whingeing, and crack open another Chicken Jalfrezi ready meal made with hen from Brazil, tomatoes from Morocco and palm oil from some poor benighted orang-utan’s last remaining bit of virgin forest. And how about an apple pie to finish, made with pristine apples from China, each individually picked and wrapped by a Chinese peasant with their eyes on the main prize of a Western-style industrialized, urban lifestyle?
Then 2008 happened. It happened like one of those awful slow-motion car crashes, with screeching tyres and the smell of burning brakes and the knowledge even as you watched it that nothing would ever be quite the same again. The causes were obvious and predictable, but still it took people by surprise: a bad harvest in Australia, a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, a set of bizarre US government policies which then saw 20 per cent of the perfectly edible corn harvest being directed towards the manufacture of bioethanol (a policy which was meant to be impeccably green, but really wasn’t), those damn Chinese peasants getting a taste for beef that required seven kilos of grain for every kilo of meat produced, a hike in oil prices which, in turn, made petrochemical-based fertilizers much more expensive, the rise and rise of commodity trading. And then there was a failure to keep reserves of basic foodstuffs. Where once a nation might have four months of wheat backed up, in our just-in-time culture, meaning it is delivered only when needed, reserves have fallen to only a matter of a few days. All of these factors we will come bac
k to in detail. What matters is the impact they had on food prices: they went up.
And up.
Between 2006 and 2008 the price of rice rose 217 per cent. Wheat went up by 136 per cent, corn by 125 per cent and soya beans by 107 per cent. Countries like Brazil, Thailand and India temporarily banned the export of certain varieties of rice. There were food riots all over the world, including in Bangladesh, Cameroon and Ivory Coast – and those are only the countries in the first part of the alphabet where there was civil unrest. In Mozambique people were killed in riots over the cost of food. Food prices would later be blamed for a second wave of civil unrest that started in Tunisia on 18 December 2010 and soon spread across the region in what was to become known as the Arab Spring. While events like the downfall of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, the end of Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year reign in Egypt, and the strife in Yemen and the civil war in Syria were clearly caused by a multitude of different competing pressures, there is a growing body of opinion that the one thing which united them was societal outrage over food prices.