BLOG: At a time of soaring fuel prices, energy bills and other cost-of-living rises that could spell disaster for many families in the UK, the poultry industry has jumped at the opportunity to use financial fears to stifle the slower-growing chicken movement.

The Observer this weekend discussed warnings issued by the British Poultry Council that switching from fast-growing broilers chickens to slower-growing breeds - a goal of campaigns like the so-called ‘Better Chicken Commitment’ - would not only increase poultry farming’s environmental impact but raise the price of chicken carcasses sold in supermarkets by more than 30 per cent.

“We are a dynamic industry and we respond to consumer demand, but there are several factors involved including a cost of living crisis,” said Richard Griffiths, chief executive at the British Poultry Council (BPC), who also maintains that breeds such as the prolific Ross 308 - selectively bred to grow to slaughter weight in just 35 days - could be reared with good animal welfare.

Isn’t it thoughtful of Griffiths to consider the struggles families are facing with everything becoming vastly more expensive? No, not really when switching to slower-growing breeds would reverse decades of genetic cost-cutting, with chickens taking longer to raise to kill weight and therefore needing more food and space. Producers would be forced to either pass on the cost to consumers or accept smaller margins.

Consider that on a plate of chicken and chips today, the chicken can be cheaper than the chips. A whole dead chicken can be bought for less than £2 per kg, while a bag of frozen chips can cost £2.19 per kg. Not that there could ever be an appropriate price for the life of a chicken, but something is clearly wrong with an industry that can raise animals at such minimal costs, and in such enormous volumes.

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If a Willow Farm whole chicken costs just £2.89 in Tesco, a 30 per cent increase on that would price them at £3.76 each, or 87p more. We’re not arguing that this would be an insignificant amount extra for a family to pay if they were in the habit of buying at least one chicken a week to roast on a Sunday, amounting to about £50 extra per year, but does it really warrant such dire warnings from the BPC?

Isn’t it more likely that the BPC - a national trade association that lobbies for the interests of the poultry industry - is simply looking to secure the financial viability of its sector by protecting practices that keep profits stable? What Griffiths and the BPC don’t say is that the same cost of living increases faced by families, such as fuel and energy bills, will also invariably affect poultry producers, meaning that they will be even more reluctant to switch to slower-growing breeds.

The cost of living crisis, if anything, is forcing us to face the reality that modern meat chicken production is broken, unsustainable and a constant compromise between profitability and welfare. The only reason chicken is so cheap today is because they grow so quickly, placing a terrible strain on their young skeletons and resulting in an ‘acceptable’ mortality rate of four per cent per shed. As we saw from VFC’s recent expose of a KFC supplier farm run by Moy Park - one of the UK’s leading poultry producers - from a shed of 52,000 chickens, 2,500 chickens dying early due to disease and health complications arising from their fast growth rate is perfectly acceptable.

There simply can’t be higher welfare without higher prices, and whether that cost affects supply or demand, something has to give. An industry that will always seek to preserve itself is more likely to pass on those costs to consumers and that, hopefully, may mean people are more inclined to look elsewhere for their cheap protein.

With plant-based alternatives becoming more mainstream and ever-closer to replicating the taste and texture of ‘real’ chicken, and lab-grown chicken flesh just around the corner, the traditional poultry industry’s days seem numbered purely on economic grounds. Raising animals for food - something that requires vastly more land and resources, and therefore overheads, than plant-based protein or lab-grown technologies - will very soon only be something niche producers do, if it isn’t outlawed completely for environmental and ethical reasons.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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