Bill Broody is an anonymous column in the monthly Ranger magazine. Every month he writes and sometimes rants about what is happening in the egg industry. See Digital Magazine link above to view the Ranger magazine.
We must be the laughing stock of the statistical world. The Ranger has long been asking questions about the import figures for eggs. Now it turns out that these figures have been wrong for the last 17 years. Why? Because these mathematical wizards never thought to apply the correct price for eggs! So for the last 17 years we have been calculating imported eggs with a wholesale price of 34 pence! Which wizard could make such a mistake? Well it appears it was HMRC. The same organisation that took Ken Dodd to court when he tried to work out his tax return based on the Napoleonic tax rate of 2 pence in the pound. They had him in court faster than he could take the money from under his mattress. They say what goes round comes round, and if they were only working out the cost of colony they would have the price right again. The wholesale price of colony must be around 34 pence again. The same price as battery 17 years ago.
I just wonder what the values of statistics are if they can be wrong for so long? What does it say about the organisations that took the statistics for granted without questioning them? Well it tells me that the industry is not doing enough to stop fraud. The only people to question them were the Ranger and Ian Chisholm. Ian’s problem was he blamed the wrong people, and no one was prepared to listen. These figures could have been right and massive fraud was going on. Ian had no reason to suspect that HMRC were calculating the imports incorrectly so he was right to question where all the eggs were going and the only conclusion he could draw was someone, somewhere was participating in fraudulent activity. These figures have now been recalculated. And the difference is mind blowing. However it turns out that Polish egg are entering the country and no one is checking to make sure that these eggs are legal. It turns out these eggs are unmarked, and therefore illegal. We cannot have much faith in the authorities who check up on such matters - as these are the same people who thought eggs had not increased in value over the last 17 years! They cannot even check to see if the egg is stamped. Not stamped with the wrong mark. Just stamped. So it turns out when the figures were wrong nobody questioned them. Now it turns out the import figure may genuinely increase due to fraud and what are we going to do about it. Well nothing!
I would like to see more pressure being asserted on the authorities whose job it is to check for illegal imports. But hang on a minute. The egg industry cannot even put together statistics on bird numbers and production systems. And if they do know, they want to keep it quieter than John Major’s affair. So how can we can have any faith in those who we should be able to trust to be hold those responsible for ensuring that illegal eggs don’t enter our shores?
I expect that those illegal unmarked eggs will end up as free range - why would they want to sell them as cheap colony eggs, or maybe they should be selling them as organic, they are in the tightest supply!. We leave our colony producers to destroy their own market. I understand from a recent meeting that the colony egg market was best described as ‘Dire’ or did they mean ‘Dye(r)’. A strange way for the grey haired champions of colony eggs to describe their market! They don’t need any help destroying their market share from some underground polish plumber. No, they are quite capable of doing that for themselves.
I will have you a bet, and I am not a gambling man, that they end up as free range. Therefore I would suggest that BFREPA must lead the fight against these criminals. How we do that is open to suggestions. But these illegal imports are pinching the money out of each producer’s pocket faster than you can sew up the holes. I don’t want them to be sold as free range. I don’t really want them to be sold as British colony. But I would rather them be sold as colony than free range. Which reminds me of a joke I once heard? Two men are walking through a forest. Suddenly, they see a tiger in the distance, running towards them. They turn and start running away. But then one of them stops takes some running shoes from his bag, and starts putting them on. “What are you doing?” says the other man. “Do you think you will run faster than the tiger with those?” “I don’t have to run faster than the tiger,” he says. “I just have to run faster than you.”
We need to be one step ahead of these criminals. We can be one step ahead of the colony market by just not having a kip in the afternoon. We know that the authorities are two steps behind the fraudsters and our own egg organisations are one step behind the authorities. So even if we are one step in front of the authorities and two steps in front of our own egg organisations we are a step closer to catching them than the other clowns. As for Ian Chisholm, Well he is now producing duck eggs. I think the free range world is a more boring place without him. But let’s make sure that BFREPA and the Ranger continue to question the authorities. We must stand up for free range in a way these other organisation won’t. BFREPA should always look after free range producers first then the rest of the egg market. The grey haired champions of colony look after their market and don’t really care much about free range.
