PIG INDUSTRY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 17, 21 January 1937, Page 11

PIG INDUSTRY

BRITAIN'S DIFFICULTY

THE CONTRACT REJECTID

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, December 23.

Efforts to establish the Home bacon industry on a sound paying basis are meeting with a number of difficulties, the latest of which is the rejection by the Baton Marketing Board of the 1937 pig contract because the numbers offered fell short by 300,000 of the minimum stipulated—2,2oo,ooo.

The pig marketing scheme first started in 1933, and the success that has attended its efforts is provided by a comparison between Home production this year and in 1930. More than double the amount.of bacon and ham is produced today, representing onethird of the consumption in the United Kingdom.

This pig marketing scheme applies only to pigs sold for bacon by registered pig producers either to registered curers or to the board, which prescribes the contract terms under which bacon pigs are sold. Registered curers cannot, subject to certain exceptions, sell bacon from pigs produced in Great Britain unless those pigs were bought under contract confirmed by the board. The contract requires the registered producer to deliver an agreed number of pigs each month.

This year about 50 curers obtained no pigs tinder contract and many of the other 550 had fewer than they wanted to keep their factories going economically through the year. The result is that pigs will be bought on a "free" market, but beyond that it is difficult to say what will happen. As neither curers nor farmers wish to see the marketing scheme abandoned it is likely that the marketing organisation will be rebuilt on a more enduring basis.

The price of bacon is high in Great Britain today, due, it is said, by complaining retailers, to quota restrictions on imports. It is agreed that the quality of British pigs and bacon has improved since the early days of the scheme. Farmers are doing their utmost to produce pigs which will grade well at the factories and earn a bonus.

A cause for the rejection of the contract is declared by the "Farmer and Stockbreeder"—-one of the notable farming periodicals—"to be found in the lack of confidence in the B.oard so freely expressed by producers,, and in the Board's own inertia.

"The Board," it says, "has developed no policy for seizing and holding the market offered to the industry. . It has lived only for the day, apparently oblivious of the fact that to hold a market there muSt be a constant supply for that market for every week from January to December. It is the duty of the Board to lead the industry, but It has not even been an animated fingerpost. It has been whirled about like a withered leaf in an autumn The Board cannot es«\e responsibility for the mess into which the industry has been dragged, and it must accept the penalty of failure. Its deliberations are private and we can only look upon it as an entity. Therefore, the only course, in the words of a famous admiral, is 'sack the lot.'"