Cheap bacon: how shops and shoppers let down our pigs
by Tom Levitt from on (#3T1KZ)
With Brexit looming our animal welfare standards are vulnerable. We've got welfare reform wrong in the past - how can we get it right in the future?
"When it came to the crunch the retailers let us down," says Ian Campbell. When he took over the running of a Norfolk farm in the early 1990s, pig farming was a successful, relatively healthy British sector.
But within a few years a government ban on the use of gestation crates, combined with a rise in the value of the pound and a pig meat glut in Europe, would decimate the industry. The number of UK farmers would be nearly halved, while cheap meat from other countries with lower welfare requirements would come flooding in.