Beggs at odds on meat move

Press, 25 May 1977, Page 23

Beggs at odds on meat move

Far from the Meat Board’s intervention in the British lamb market losing its friends in the meat retail trade there, the acting chairman of the board (Mr A. M. Begg) said that the board had had better cooperation from retailers in joint promotions this year than ever before.

He was commenting about remarks by the chairman of the Labour Party conference’s primary producers’ advisory committee, Mr A. W. Begg. He

told the conference that the party would be pressing for a commission of inquiry to determine, among • other things, whether the board’s intervention policy was justified.

A great many wild statements had been made soon after the board announced its preparedness to intervene in the market, said Mr A. M. Begg. But none of these had come to pass. The intervention was not really a trading operation, he said. It was an extension of the board’s normal function of phasing supplies on to the British market. This was normally done through shipping, but because this year the shipping programme had got out of phase due to industrial problems the board had adopted a different system of putting meat on to the market. The whole object was to disrupt the normal trade as little as possible.