British Agriculture and Food Labelling

I declare an interest as a keeper of rare-breed pigs. I have four minutes to cover pigs, pork and bacon. I am very proud indeed of the animal welfare standards in the UK, but the rest of the EU seems to be capitalising on our good nature. Rightly or wrongly, most of our constituents believe that their Government observe and gold-plate EU directives that the rest of the EU pays lip service to. That impression, I am afraid, is borne out by the sad story of the British pig industry. What on earth did the Government think would happen when, in 1999, they changed pig welfare standards unilaterally, without the possibility of any form of import control, so that cheap meat from pigs kept in lousy conditions would flood the UK market and trash indigenous mid to low-end production? The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has visited some pretty dreadful things on farmers these past few years, but as an exercise in sheer stupidity that takes the biscuit. The result has been that we have simply exported cheap, cruel meat production to the continent. Today, we have heard a lot about the misdeeds of supermarkets. I was in a supermarket in my constituency at the weekend. A big banner said, ““We only sell British Pork””. Many would think that that included bacon, but the sainted Jamie Oliver has alerted us to the sharp practices of our supermarkets. And lo, what do we find, but that particular supermarket is peddling a large quantity of Danish bacon? As Jamie told the Health Committee recently:"““I think labelling in Great Britain is a disgrace. Categorically, we are run by the EU on labelling.””" He is absolutely right. We find on the front of packs ““Sourced in the UK””, yet on the back—in the tiniest font, illegible to many of our constituents, or at least to those who do not have 20:20 vision—we find that the product is grown anywhere but the UK. The commercially obliging badge ““Produced in the UK”” is admissible under World Trade Organisation rules, EU law and the labelling regulations if the very last stage in the food processing took place here, even if the ingredients on which it is based were largely produced abroad. A picture paints a thousand words. Idyllic rural scenes on packets of meat scream ““Made in Britain””. That does not happen by chance, for the supermarket marketing men are well versed in human psychology. Flip the pack over and if people have good eyesight they will see that the meat is extremely well travelled. My own favourite is something that its retailer is pleased to call Wiltshire cured bacon. There is a way to cure bacon in the Wiltshire manner. I found it in Mrs. Beeton's cook book at the weekend, and I suspect that the supermarket in question found it there too. I have no way of telling how true to the Wiltshire curing method that bacon is, but that is irrelevant. The purpose of marketing Wiltshire cured bacon is to suggest to the customer that the product is British and therefore trustworthy. Look at the small print and we see that the product is from elsewhere in the EU. Last month, the Secretary of State stamped his foot and told supermarkets to play fair. He said that they were harming the Government's attempts to get people to buy British food, but this Minister's Government have presided over all this. They have exported our one-time poor animal welfare standards to the continent and have trashed the British pork industry in the process. She may agree with Jamie Oliver that that is a disgrace, but if that is so, it is a disgrace that this Government have presided over.