“When it came to the crunch the retailers let us down,” says Ian Campbell. When he took over the running of a Norfolk farm in the early 1990s, pig farming was a successful, relatively healthy British sector.

But within a few years a government ban on the use of gestation crates, combined with a rise in the value of the pound and a pig meat glut in Europe, would decimate the industry. The number of UK farmers would be nearly halved, while cheap meat from other countries with lower welfare requirements would come flooding in.



The aim of the stalls is to prevent large pigs taking food from small ones. Photograph: agrarfoto.com / Alamy Stock Phot/Alamy Stock Photo

As a report out this week calls for British farmers to be financially rewarded for high welfare, a vigorous debate is taking place around the future of our standards as we head towards Brexit. Will we hold on to them, and become a beacon for good practice as Michael Gove has promised? Will the need for a trade deal - any trade deal - trump that? Or will we find ourselves in the same place as twenty years ago, holding our own farmers to high standards while shoppers and retailers sneakily buy the cheap stuff?



So what happened exactly when gestation crates were banned by our government in 1999? The crates were invented more than 50 years ago as a solution to preventing larger pigs taking food from smaller ones, enabling farmers to keep productivity higher. They became common in the US and Europe from the late 1960s onwards. But they were criticised by welfare groups for preventing the animals from properly moving and carrying out natural behaviours such as rooting.



The idea of a ban was first floated in the early 1990s when campaign group Compassion in World Farming persuaded former MP Sir Richard Body to propose legislation to outlaw the practice of keeping pregnant sows in narrow stalls or chains throughout their pregnancies. The bill quickly picked up cross-party support from MPs, forcing the then-Conservative government to act.

And to start with it looked like it was all going to be fine. Farmers put money into new facilities, and the big supermarkets started making it a requirement for farmers not to use the crates, remembers Ian Campbell.

But with a rise in the value of the pound and a glut of pig meat in Europe, the retailers appeared to forget about the requirement, and began to import cheaper Dutch, Danish and German pig meat, where the animals continued to be confined. “Price was more important, so they didn’t stick with British producers at a time when we really needed them to,” says Campbell, who lost his processor contract as demand for British pig meat fell away. He was forced to sell his slaughtered pigs for half the price on the open market and the owners closed down the unit soon afterwards.

Demand for higher welfare pig meat is low - currently just 1-2% of UK pigs are reared as organic or free-range.

The hope had been that shoppers would support the higher welfare standards, as every poll had shown. Instead, the shoppers snapped up the cheap stuff. UK pig meat imports from Denmark rose by 50% and from Germany by 400% between 1997-2007, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board.

It was the start of a “perfect storm” for the pig sector, says Stewart Houston, former chairman of the National Pig Association. Outbreaks of classical swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease further restricted sales of UK pigs. The ban had also coincided with an end to the practice of feeding meat and bonemeal – ie animal by-products – to omnivores after the BSE crisis in 1996.

The UK pig industry was hit hard, with the number of producers falling from just under 10,000 in 1999 to less than 6,000 within a decade, and the country’s self sufficiency in pig meat tumbling from more than 80% in late 1990s to less than 50% today. (Campbell no longer runs a farm himself, but supplies artificial insemination equipment to the pig sector instead.)

“All we ended up doing [with the stall ban] is giving more money to pig producers in Europe to re-invest in their stall systems,” says Zoe Davies, chief executive of the National Pig Association.

“It was the right thing to do, as it’s not acceptable to keep sows in stalls, but the problem was that it was done unilaterally,” says the editor of Pig World, Alistair Driver. “The line from the government at the time was that farmers would get a premium from the market for the higher standard.

“But this didn’t materialise and what actually happened was that the big retailers continued to quite legally import pig meat from countries still using sow stalls,” he says.

It has been a similar story in Sweden, which has banned tail-docking and farrowing crates, and was the first country to prohibit sow stalls, in 1994. At that time almost all the pork sold in the country was domestically produced. Its self-sufficiency dropped to 70% after the country joined the EU in 1995, with a surge in imports from Germany and Denmark where costs of production are lower.

Compassion in World Farming says Defra cannot meet its promises to increase animal welfare while still promoting cheap food imports. Photograph: Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals





Across the rest of the EU, it was not until 2013 that a partial ban on the use of stalls was brought in, although it still allows pigs to be confined to individual stalls for a further four weeks after being separated from piglets post-weaning. Meanwhile, producers in Brazil, Canada and in many US states are still allowed to keep sows in stalls their whole life.



Some argue that pig farmers exaggerate the impact of the sow stall ban. Compassion in World Farming points out that it has benefited the UK sector in the long run by allowing it to position itself as a high-welfare producer.



But it too sees the bigger problem. Defra cannot meet its promises to increase animal welfare while still promoting cheap food imports. “If we are going to have better welfare we have to make sure our farmers are not undermined, and be tougher in our trade negotiations post-Brexit,” says CIWF’s chief policy advisor, Peter Stevenson. He points to the example of a new ballot initiative in California that aims to ban the sale in California of pork from herds that use sow stalls.

Non-EU member Switzerland also banned farrow crates and tail docking and has costs of production that are double those of neighbouring Germany, France and Austria. But their farmers are protected from imports and given payments for complying with high animal welfare standards.

In an ideal world UK supermarkets would promise to only accept pig meat produced to higher standards (so far only the Co-op has done this), says Sandra Edwards, professor emerita at Newcastle University and leading pig welfare specialist.



But the reality? Shoppers may say they want pigs to have better lives. But they won’t actually pay more for bacon. At the moment, the demand for higher welfare pig meat is low, with just 1%-2% of pigs in the UK currently reared as organic or free-range.

“People don’t want to absorb a detailed argument,” says Edwards. “When consumers are there in the shop and spending their money they don’t realise how their purchases can influence welfare standards. Most rely on retailers to take control. They just don’t want to think about it.”