UK farmers have to send meat to the EU for processing due to lack of workers

To the long list of products with shortages or other production problems in the UK, a new one has just been added: meat. The British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) has warned of an imminent price hike due to a lack of workers, which forces farmers to take their animals abroad to slaughter them and then bring them back.

The association’s director, Nick Allen, said on the BBC’s Farming Today radio show, the beef is being shipped to Ireland and pork producers are exploring the possibility of sending the animals to the Netherlands for processing. . The costs of this round trip through the English Channel or the Irish Sea amount to about 1,500 pounds (1,750 euros) per truck. “Sooner or later these costs will be passed on to consumers,” he warned.

Staff shortages have caused nearly 150,000 pigs to be trapped on farms, unable to be slaughtered in the UK, forcing farmers to pay to slaughter them in unusable conditions because it is too costly keep them. The government has issued a short-term temporary visa to attract European butchers in an attempt to alleviate the crisis, but the National Pig Association reported that the application process takes too long and processors fear that recruitment will not start before Christmas. .

The government and the meat industry cannot agree on the number of skilled foreign butchers needed to cover the labor shortage. The BMPA says that the six-month temporary permit for pork processors is not enough to overcome the crisis, as they estimate that the entire meat industry is dealing with a labor shortage of about 12,000 people. Quite a logical statement given the failure of the trucker visa.

Boris Johnson’s Executive, for his part, remains in his thirteen: as with the truck driver crisis, he insists that temporary visas are not a long-term solution, and that what he hopes is that the sector organize a system to train and certify British butchers to fill vacancies. The problem, of course, is how to motivate the country’s own citizens to decide on that career. Until then, it will be the Irish or the Dutch who will cut the British meat. And the English, those who will pay.