Farmers who mounted a blockade of a major distribution centre for Aldi supermarkets in a protest at falling beef prices say it is the first of many such protests.

The farmers who are members of the Irish Farmers’ Association drove a tractor and trailer across the entrance to the facility in Naas, Co Kildare at 7am on Thursday.

The distribution centre is one of only two in the Republic and serves Aldi outlets in half of the country including Dublin. However the German retailer said its shops remained open.

 

Patrick Logue, Vivienne Clarke

Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua said the country must resolutely work to achieve the target of recovering pig production numbers, and stabilize pork supply for the upcoming holidays, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

China must ensure stable pork supply in key periods of early 2020, including the Lunar New Year holidays in January and during the annual National People’s Congress in March, Xinhua cited Hu as saying at a meeting on animal husbandry on Saturday.

Millions of pigs have died or been culled due to the African swine fever outbreak in China and other Asian countries such as Vietnam. The disease has slashed China’s pig herd by as much as half since August 2018, U.S. agribusiness firm Archer Daniels Midland Co said in November.

 

Lusha Zhang & Se Young Lee

Meat is crucial for feeding the planet, leading scientists have said, as they warned it is not more environmentally-friendly to go vegan.

Experts from the University of Edinburgh and Scotland’s Rural College said farmers were increasingly feeling demonised by the unsupported ‘meat is evil’ claims being promoted by environmental lobbyists.

Speaking at a panel in central London, they argued that meat was critical for the physical and mental health of children, particularly in developing countries, and said that moving away from livestock farming would not improve land use.

 

Sarah Knapton

Mutton is making a comeback because it has lost its “cheap and tough” image, farmers and butchers have said.

Now, environmentally-conscious people are choosing to buy the older sheep meat, as butchers say lamb, mutton and hogget should be treated with as much reverence as beef.

Just as there are different breeds and cuts of beef, there are many types of lamb, and tastes lost since the Victorian times are coming back onto our tables as farmers start a heritage sheep project.

 

Helena Horton

Farm and red meat industry leaders have hit out at the national broadcaster’s programme – Meat: A Threat to our Planet? – which explored the impact of red meat production on the environment.

Martin Morgan, executive manager of the Scottish Association of Meat Wholesalers (SAMW), accused the BBC of demonising the farming industry and described the programme as a “narrow and grossly incomplete representation of red meat production”.

He said: “Predictably, the programme failed to address the vast differences between the feed lots of the US and the extensive grass-based production of beef and lamb on which the supreme quality of Scotch beef and lamb is founded.”

 

Gemma Mackenzie

The European Parliament is proposing measures to put an end to the wave of cheap Ukrainian chicken meat flooding the European market through a loophole. The country avoided tariffs by exporting a special bone-in cut of poultry meat.

As a tradeoff, Ukraine is permitted to export 50,000 tons more chicken fillet exempt of import levies to the EU. The chicken fillets with a piece of bone and skin that were used in the loophole will now fall under the quota. This means that this chicken fillet can no longer be imported at unlimited quantities and tax-free.

The Loophole:

By cutting chicken fillet in a special way, with wing and skin attached, the Ukrainians used a loophole to get kilos more chicken fillets into the EU than the 20,000 tonnes agreed in the association agreement in 2014. Chicken fillet with a piece of wing could be imported into the EU without restrictions. After Dutch MEPs sounded the alarm, the European Commission entered into negotiations with the government in Kiev about adjusting the treaty.

Fabian Brockotter

 

The four UK farming union presidents have said that last night’s BBC documentary, Meat: a threat to our planet?, shows why food standards must be upheld in future trade deals.

They said: “At no point did the documentary explain the vast differences between American meat production and UK production. This was a massive oversight considering the BBC’s audience and would have left people with the impression that all meat is produced in the same way.

“We know the public want to eat sustainably and they can do this by investing in the UK livestock sector, which is already producing some of the most climate-friendly beef and lamb in the world and has an ambition to do even more. Beef production in the UK is already 2.5 times more efficient than the global average and 4 times more efficient than places which are deforesting land.”

Simon King

It was meant to be a documentary exploring the impact our carnivorous ways was having on the planet.

But the BBC’s ‘Meat: A Threat To Our Planet’ has become embroiled in a row with British farmers, who fear the show could damage their reputation.

The show, headed up by Liz Bonnin who has presented on Springwatch and Blue Planet Live, took viewers to the Amazon rainforest to see the destruction to the rainforest to make room for meat production.

 

Helena Horton

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Monday that commodity exporters must disclose sales of hog carcasses, giving officials and traders more insight into a surge of Chinese pork buying that has roiled global meat markets.

China’s pork imports have nearly doubled this year as a fatal pig disease has decimated its herd and pushed prices of the country’s favorite meat to record highs. Its beef and chicken imports have also climbed as China is seeking to replace millions of pigs killed by African swine fever.

The USDA published a rule to specify that exporters must report sales of pork and beef carcasses effective immediately because pork sales to China were rising and there was “an apparent lack of commensurate reporting,” according to an emailed statement.

Tom Polansek

China’s effort to fill a protein gap created by the spread of African swine fever is rippling through Brazil’s massive beef industry, pushing up prices and profits for both cattle ranchers and meatpackers.

China’s effort to fill a protein gap created by the spread of African swine fever is rippling through Brazil’s massive beef industry, pushing up prices and profits for both cattle ranchers and meatpackers.

While China has been increasing local poultry production and raising pork imports from several suppliers, Brazil is the only big beef exporter able to meet China’s demand. That’s leading Chinese importers to buy all types of cuts, raising prices along the Brazilian chain, from calves to animals ready for slaughter.

Brazilian beef shipments to China jumped 62% last month from a year ago as China approves more plants to export. Both wholesale beef and cattle prices jumped about 30% this month, according to figures from Cepea, the University of Sao Paulo research arm.

Tatiana Freitas