Irish poultry firm closes, Nando's announce new openings, with chicken from Northern Ireland

News has emerged today that Cootehill Farms, also known as Co-Operative Poultry Products Ltd in Cavan is to close with the loss of 90 jobs. It comes at a time when chicken producers and processors are under incredible pressure to deal with the spiraling cost of animal feed which is making business for some, unsustainable.

The company had been trading in County Cavan, the centre of Irish poultry production since 1949. The 25 farmers who supply chicken to the plant have also now lost their source of income and will need to get contracts with other processors fast, or go under. I've written extensively about the Irish poultry sector on this blog and pointed out many times that unless we eat Irish chicken, we won't have an Irish poultry sector. Cheap imports particularly in food service are killing the Irish trade, also loose chicken on butcher and supermarket counters coming in from Eastern Europe or as far as Thailand, sometimes bed and breakfasting (often with some kind of bulking out processing) in the EU to attain an EU origin stamp.


On the same day we hear of the Cootehill Farms closure, Nandos, the global chicken giant (think Kentucky Fried Chicken with a zestier twist) announces it's opening two new restaurants in Blanchardstown and Liffey Valley shopping centres. These outlets will employ an additional 100 people and bring to seven their number of Irish restaurants. Nandos is a South African success story - originally set up in 1987 it has become a family-friendly dining-out giant, with 850 branches worldwide. And guess where they get their chicken from? Moy Park in Northern Ireland.

Moy Park are also a huge food success story but they are one of the reasons small producers in the Republic cannot compete. Their scale is enormous, they have 13 separate processing facilities in Northern Ireland, England, France and Holland. This year Moypark - owned by the Brazilian food giant Marfrig, posted annual sales of £1.07 billion. You can argue the 32 counties is still Ireland but it's not that simple. We gain none of the revenue in tax from this business nor a cent of the profits which go back to Brazil. Even Irish large-scale poultry businesses such as Vincent Carton's Manor Farm is finding it hard to compete with giants like Marfrig. With feed prices going ever upwards, the retail sector is also bearing the cost. But the view of Irish farmers and operators in the sector is that if consumers are prepared to pay for Irish chicken the present storm can be weathered out and we can still have a viable industry.

I talked to Dublin restaurateur Joe Macken (Crack Bird, Jo Burger, Skinflint) about this recently. He still buys chicken from the Republic for his string of eateries as he feels strongly that if we don't, we'll have no Irish chicken supply left and only ourselves to blame. He is also having to pay a lot more for his Irish chicken as the processors ask their customers to take the brunt of the hikes they're having to pay farmers to keep business sustainable. And what's the root of that? Drought in the US, Ukraine bans on wheat exports and spiraling costs in compound feed ingredients that are completely beyond Ireland's control.

So what's your view folks? Time to put our money where our mouth is or pay for it later?

See also - my extended piece on the issue last year in The Irish Times -

basketcase: Irish chicken, the end of the road?

Would you bet on the price of food if eventually it made you poorer?

Great to read today that Barclays have made £500 million this year from betting on food prices, a practice that has been labelled by observers as "immoral" and "lacking a moral compass". Betting on commodity prices is a major part of the financial trading markets and unfortunately results in making food more expensive for the rest of us.

In the developing world, it can result in even more people starving than at present, and creates uncertainty and pressure on food supplies globally. In Ireland, the hangover from drought in the US, rising grain prices combined with speculative profiteering by commodity traders has had it's own effects. According to the Irish Farmer's Association one third of Irish pig farmers are now close to hitting the wall.

Betting on food prices is a huge driver in the cost of the food, and banks, hedge funds and the like don't give a whit about its knock on effects. In 2008, the exorbitant rise of food prices caused public disorder throughout the developing world and particularly in North Africa. This movement about hunger essentially, and lack of fairness in the food distribution system extended into human rights and became the Arab spring. It felled Colonel Gadaffi in Libya and began the struggle for equality that has lead to the terrible bloodshed now happening in Syria.

I travelled to Lebanon and Syria a few years ago with my husband, not as journalists but as a curious people seeking an inside track on what was going on in these fascinating countries. When I think now of the gorgeous people we stayed with it gives me shivers to think where they might be now. The retired academic who ran a small B and B in Aleppo with a library full of French and English literature and Roman walls propping up the basement. On a rooftop terrace we looked across the dusky skyline of one of the world's most beautiful cities, talked about the Assad regime and how on earth they were going to get rid of him. This fantastic man is surely fled from Syria by now, or else he is dead.

The price of food has always been a driver in political and social change. Land and the resources to grow food on are the primary reason countries go to war. Now more than ever the pressure on fragile world resources in the food chain needs serious attention. We also need to be cogent of a food ownership and distribution system that is deeply inequitable and flawed. Irish farmers are suffering at present as they rely on imported grain and soya to feed livestock and the price of this food has risen to almost twice it's value since the start of this year.

Pigs and poultry who are indoor animals (in the coventional systems) are wholly dependent on cereal food. They are also suffering in the face of cheap imports from the EU and further afield. All of us like a bargain and we're also grocery shopping in more lean times, but asking food producers to grow livestock below the cost of production is something that shouldn't be occurring. On RTE Countrywide on Saturday I joined presenter Damien O'Reilly in examining how critical this problem is. We asked why no mechanism so far seems to able to get the food chain under control and limit its volatility and that knock on effect on farmers and consumers.

Check it out at the link below and ask yourself, is cheap food really the way to go? For all our sakes.

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/countrywide/

Would you eat meat that was grown in a lab? Even if it solved world hunger?

Winston Churchill - bon vivant and lover of food, drink and the odd giant cigar, once offered a view of the future where meat would be grown not on a farm, but in a lab. Churchill wrote: "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.''

While it sounds very Orwellian and proves that Churchill wasn't just handy at moving model armies around a giant map table - now, eighty years after his pronouncement, Churchill's predictions are coming to pass. Scientists are close to producing the world's first commercial meat grown in a lab. Mark Post of Maastricht University, one of the premier scientists in this field, claims he will produce the first "cultured meat" burger by the end of the year.The question is, would you eat it?

Most initial reaction will no doubt go along the lines of "Hell No!!!"

After all, lab grown meat is grown from stem cell technology, a science that makes a lot of people squirm as in the first place, let alone, suggest they eat the results. In order to grow "cultured" meat, stem cells are taken from pig or poultry muscle and then cultured with added nutrients to form a film of animal flesh. Think - chicken fillet, only thinner.

If you're at this point pretty repulsed by the idea, think of the following reasons for why lab-grown meat could be better for animals and also, better for people.

Growing meat, whether in factory farms or out in fields, is one of the major contributors to global environmental degradation, especially de-forestation and global warming. It uses up water resources and has contributed to huge loss of biodiversity. Currently our appetite for meat has meant that almost one-third of global land use is used for growing either meat, or cereals to feed meat animals - including cattle, pigs and poultry. You could argue (and plenty do) that our lust for meat, and the growing "middle class" appetite for meat in China and India is killing the planet.

And how does the alternative stand up? - research shows that cultured meat has 80-95% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 99% lower land use and 80-90% lower water use compared to conventionally produced meat in Europe. More importantly, even if the meat produced by factory farms (which certainly in the US and in some cases Europe, have proved to have dubious records for animal welfare) was replaced with cultured meat, it would take the horrors of large scale factory farming out of the food chain. If people don't want to look at video of where their chicken is produced well then they probably would be better off served by something grown in a lab.

But the real issue comes when you look at world hunger. Cereals are grown all over the world not for people to eat, but to go into animal feed. And this is the case even in developing countries where hunger and deprivation are serious issues. Cultured meat, (given that over time it would have to be produced at huge levels) would mean that less cereals leave the food system for animal feed and instead can be given to humans, yes - us, to eat.

So what about it? Would you eat it, even if you knew it was morally and ethically more correct?