0.05p for 480g of cheese? A fair share is all we ask
How much of the profit made on the staple foods that we buy in the supermarkets, bread, cheese and meat for instance, is paid to the farmer who produces them?
I’d hazard a guess as 10%. Wishful thinking? Five per cent maybe?
I think most people’s guesses would fail to come anywhere close to the actual figures that have been flagged up in the report on food prices published by the sustainable food charity Sustain.
The revelations make for painful reading.
For the dairy farmers among you, on a 480g pack of mild cheddar you will be receiving 0.05p in profits on your costs of £1.48; meanwhile the supermarkets get 2.5p profit from costs of £0.56, that’s 200 times more profit.
It is absolutely staggering how little of the money that we pay for our food finds its way into the hands of the farmers and growers.
Farmers carry so much of the risk and work in difficult conditions to put food on our tables. We expect them to look after our landscape and protect nature too.
Governments want them to do more of that in the future, with nature friendly farming and with reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
To do that they need more money in their businesses, money that should not be leaching out of the system into the coffers of food industry intermediaries and supermarkets.
Sustain is quite right to call out supermarkets on this and to demand legislation that forces retailers to publish more information about their supply chains. They also want legally binding supply chain codes of practice to make supermarkets give farmers a fairer deal.
Retailers will no doubt argue that now is not the right time for interfering with prices, with the squeeze on consumers’ budgets, but if, for instance, the 0.05p was doubled it would make very little difference to the shelf price.
Supermarkets continue to post record profits and it is time they shared some of those with the farming community.
..