Still work to be done to get East Anglia's pig industry 'off life support'
Tens of thousands of healthy pigs have been culled and over 150,000 are stuck on farms across the UK, due to labour issues at slaughter houses and processing plants
There's still work to be done to get East Anglia's pig industry 'off life support', despite a recent crisis meeting with the Government.
That's according to Rob Mutimer, an East Anglian pig farmer and head of the National Pig Association.
Tens of thousands of healthy pigs have been culled and over 150,000 are stuck on farms across the UK, due to labour issues at slaughter houses and processing plants.
Mr Mutimer says there's positives to take from the discussion:
"In some respects we left feeling slightly disappointed that we hadn't got firm commitments from all members of the supply chain. But we did at least all get round the table and have some fairly difficult conversations on how we solve this quite complexed problem, so I'm happy we got that far.
We set a timescale for the backlog at the early part of the meeting and that probably isn't realistic. But within months rather than weeks, we hope to have drawn up a plan next week of how we are going to address this backlog and get these pigs off farms and get some sort of normality back".
He told us that the last few months haven't been easy:
"We thought that things were going to improve at the end of the last year, they didn't and Omicron certainly hasn't helped us coming into the post Christmas period. I have to thank my staff and the people that have worked for us, for their dedication and hard work in keeping up standards and keeping us moving on through such a difficult period.
Mr Mutimer concluded by saying the industry still needs support to ride out the storm:
"We have lost 10% of the herd already and people have left the industry. We have to go through a range of different measures with the Government that can help and the first thing we have to do to help the industry is to reduce the backlog of pigs on farms. We are asking the Government to look at some financial help either with loans or grants just to stabilise the situation we are in".