THE PLIGHT OF THE PIG IN THE NANNY STATE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 57

is the vulnerability of confined animal feeding operations to disease that has led, not just to
the swill ban, but to the draconian health and safety legislation that has forced the closure
of numerous small slaughterhouses and made life difficult for small farmers. The National
Farmers Union does not champion small scale swill farmers, it represents the big boys, so,
like the British Pig Association, it supported the swill ban. 17
Nor were the swill recyclers and renderers helped by their public image. The Co-op had
already banned swill-fed pork from their shops in 1996, stating that it 'was not a natural
feeding practice'; 18 and in the UK there was a conspicuous silence from the champions of
recycling, Friends of the Earth, who were no doubt afraid that raising the swill issue might
alienate some of their vegetarian supporters. One of the rare voices raised against the swill
ban was that of Boris Johnson, then MP for Henley. At a parliamentary debate in 2004 he
reported:
To take one example, Phyllis Court Hotel in Henley must now pay an extra £1,000
a year to a licensed collector, whose responsibility is to remove wet waste that previ-
ously went to a pigswill feeder. Given that there is room for only three years' waste in
our land fill sites, that is not the cleanest and greenest solution. It is estimated that the
ban on swill feeding is generating an extra 1.7 million tonnes of waste per year, and
that which does not fill up our landfill sites must be going down our drains, clogging
up the sewers and attracting vermin. 19
Agriculture Minister Ben Bradshaw replied that when the ban was imposed, only a small
percentage of the national pig herd were fed on swill and only a small proportion of our
food waste was going to pigs. In other words, the once-thriving swill industry was already
so decimated by regulations that one might as well kill it off.
Bradshaw didn't specify exactly how much food was being wasted through-out the coun-
try, and there still seems to be some uncertainty. The government-sponsored Waste Re-
sources Action Partnership (WRAP) states 'about 6.7 million tonnes - about a third of all
the food we buy - ends up being thrown away', while another report commissioned by
WRAP gives a figure of 5.5 million. 20 But these figures only represent domestic waste. Ac-
cording to New Labour's favourite food consultant, Lord Haskins, quoted in The Independ-
ent , we throw away about 20 million tonnes, half of all the food produced. Sixteen million
tonnes of this is from homes, shops, restaurants, schools etc. The rest is lost between the
farm and the shop shelf. 21 'The government take their recycling targets seriously,' Brad-
shaw continued in his 2004 speech, 'and are aware that the amount of biodegradable waste
sent to landfill must be reduced, not increased. DEFRA strongly supports the option of
composting and the biogas treatment of catering waste.'