Who are the real swine?

Sunday 8 July 2012

Everyone has to make a margin, but the real culprit in the prospective closure of the Hall's of Broxburn meat processing plant would appear to be the supermarkets, which have been happy enough to bump up the cost to shoppers over the past few years but have been less eager to pass these price increases back down the supply chain.

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Pig farmers, in particular, have been hit by drastic increases in food, fuel and fertiliser and, given limited supply, have been able to charge the processors more for live pigs. No wonder the Broxburn plant, which supplies about 75% of all Asda's pork products, has been losing £80,000 a day.

Apart from the human tragedy of the prospective 1700 job losses, there are real fears in meat-producing circles that farmers will see the problems faced by Vion, the world's sixth-largest meat producer, and conclude that they should stop producing pigs, and that supermarkets will start sourcing their bacon and sausages from overseas producers, worsening Britain's current problem of over-capacity in slaughterhouses.Although spun by the Scottish Government, the slashing by one-third of the Edinburgh-Glasgow Improvement Programme (EGIP), one of the "fast-tracked" (ha!) elements of the 2009 Strategic Transport Projects Review, remains very bad news for Scotland. It means that a significant change in the quality of our rail infrastructure has been kicked into the long grass. As Liz Cameron of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce put it: "EGIP was a project which had the potential to transform connectivity across central Scotland and, sadly, it looks as though this potential may fail to be realised". Not to extend an electrified service even as far as Dunblane is another missed opportunity for the Scottish Government to choose to spend on things that make Scotland work better than in the rest of the UK. Transport Minister Keith Brown's constituents in Dunblane and Alloa may remember this in 2015.

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Who are the real swine?

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