Supermarkets blind to beef catastrophe - NBA
Beef buyers at Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys and Morrisons hold the future depth of the UK beef industry in their hands, and if they do not immediately pay prime cattle processors more money for retail packs, they will force an unwanted, and unnecessary, contraction in the national breeding cow herd, the National Beef Association warned today.
"Single minded, career men and women, are playing price games with beef displayed on supermarket shelves and ruining the British beef industry as a result – which is not a clever thing at all," accused the NBA’s chairman, Oisin Murnion.
"They are so keen to make high cost, high provenance, British beef a loss leader, and get one over departmental competitors at rival companies by pulling in more bargain seeking customers, they have still to notice the damage they are doing to farms, the countryside, and perhaps most stupidly of all – their own future supplies."
"And so the NBA is telling them that thousands of specialist beef farmers are looking closely at this autumn’s depressed cattle market and wondering whether to reduce their commitment to beef production, or even drop out altogether,"
Over the next six weeks, hundreds of thousands of specially bred young cattle will be sold off the grazing land on which they were born, and move onto specialist finishing farms from which they will emerge as prime British beef sometime next year.
Last autumn this stock made almost enough money to cover production costs and cattle breeders were encouraged to maintain cow herd numbers in the hope that this year’s prices would improve further.
"Calamitously that has not happened. The supermarkets have been so keen to sell more beef as cheap mince, at bargain basement prices, that the bottom has fallen out of the finished cattle market," Mr Murnion explained.
"And because farmers who specialise in feeding beef cattle have lost so much money they must pay less for replacement stock. Not surprisingly calf breeders have had their optimism knocked out of them and soon more cows will be sold onto the mince market instead of being put back in-calf."
"An immediate, upward move, in the beef price would help to curb this disastrous trend by encouraging finishers to pay more for replacement cattle - which could in turn persuade breeders to postpone plans to get out of beef cattle altogether."
"But the UK’s powerful beef buyers are determined, for their own short sighted reasons, the market will go the other way. Last week cattle prices fell yet again and because the stuffing has been knocked out of them more, extremely valuable, beef farmers will quit."
"The National Beef Association wants everyone to realise what a catastrophe this would be. Less breeding cattle means a scruffier countryside but just as importantly it means less British beef at a time world supplies are tightening and imports to replace it will be harder to find," he added
