----- Original Message -----
From: ...

Originally from: <...>
To: <...>
Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 5:07 PM
Subject: Re: [farmtalking] RE: CONCERNS OVER LIVE EXPORTS

Thanks Coleen...I took the liberty of posting that onto LAWS
Joyce

Author wrote:
Taken from the Guardian Archive
Coleen
So ingrained has the concept of cheap food become that it seems

impossible

now to eradicate it from the political process, institutional planning

and

the public mind. Yet no one seems to stop to count the true cost of

'cheaptoirs.

food'.
For a number of years the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food

has

been following a covert policy of closing down 'red meat' abattoirs. The
theory was that there were too many of them to be viable – and it was

true

that many of them were badly run.
Under the guise of implementing EU regulations, MAFF set about closing

the

smaller ones, and centralising the slaughter of animals in large units.

The

logic behind this had little to do with the EU – it would have been easy

to

bring the smaller abattoirs up to standard over a reasonable period –

and

much to do with economies of scale.
Never mind that animals would become more stressed because they would

have

to travel greater distances to be slaughtered. Never mind the greater
chances of infectivity in the case of an outbreak of disease. The costs

of

slaughter would be reduced. Meat would be cheaper. The public would be
appeased.
So, between 1985 and 2000, the number of abattoirs fell from 1,022 to

387.

Over the same period, the average number of animals killed each week has
risen from 13,313 per abattoir to 32,729. The consequences of this

policy

have been made evident by the course of the latest outbreak of
foot-and-mouth. When the first case was identified, the focus of
investigation fell on Cheale Meats in Little Warley, Essex. It has since
been established that more than 600 farms, from as far away as
Northumberland, Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Isle of Wight, Northern

Ireland

and Scotland, send their meat there.

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