Egg producers across the EU should be subject to exactly the same treatment when it comes to chicken welfare say members of the NFU’s South West poultry board, who are urging the NFU to keep up pressure to ensure other countries will comply with new regulations outlawing battery cages from 1st January 2012.
They claim that, whilst this country’s producers will be close to 100 per cent compliant with a ban on conventional battery cages, there will be widespread non-compliance in many EU member states which will give their farmers an unfair commercial advantage in terms of lower production costs.
“There is general agreement that non-compliant eggs must not be allowed to enter the UK market, but this would only apply to eggs still in their shells and will be of limited efficacy, plus leaving the floodgates wide open to the millions of eggs used in processed form,” said NFU South West poultry board chairman, Simon Barton.
“This level of compromise is a disaster which is simply not acceptable. Our poultry board is concerned that the non-compliance of some EU member states via ‘leniencies’ being afforded to their chicken farmers will mean that eggs aren’t being produced on a level playing field and that the effect could be as disastrous as it was on our pig farmers who were virtually wiped out by similar circumstances.”
UK farmers have risen to the challenge of complying with the new regulations by investing £400 million in ‘enriched colony’ systems, which give chickens more space, opting for free range and ‘barn’ systems, or bowing out of egg production altogether.
No comments have been made.