On Monday 19 October, Friends of the River Wye travelled to London alongside campaigners and communities affected by factory farming to demand that the government stops ignoring the damage industrial agriculture is causing to our rivers. The mass lobby day was organised by Foodrise.
At a time when the river Wye is showing extreme stress from agricultural pollution and climate change we wholeheartedly agree with River Action that Big Chicken is a recipe for river pollution.
We were delighted that three of our Wye MPs came to meet us - Ellie Chowns (Green MP for North Herefordshire), Catherine Fookes (Labour MP for Monmouthshire) and David Chadwick (Lib Dem MP for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe) - and that all promised to take action to scrutinise the Poultry Growth Strategy.
Our co-chair Nicola Cutcher has recently written a piece for Prospect magazine on the dangers of letting large agribusinesses dictate our national food strategy.
Nicola gave an impassioned speech at Westminster that you can read below:
I’ve come from the River Wye, which is one of the most loved and celebrated rivers in the UK. But sadly its official ecological status is now: ’Unfavourable: Declining’.
People living alongside the river have seen the decline firsthand - the stones on the riverbed are slimier, the water is murkier and there’s less life in and around the river than there used to be.
It’s suffering from algal blooms which smother the river in summer and turn it green - one of the drivers of algal blooms is too many nutrients.
Where are the nutrients coming from?
Well, studies show that the vast majority of phosphorus imported into the catchment comes in the form of animal feed. And the vast majority of phosphorus entering the river is in the form of manure.
This is a problem caused by factory farming which concentrates too many animals in one area.
There are over 20 million chickens in the Wye catchment - that’s totally out of balance with the surrounding eco-system. 20 million birds create far more muck than the surrounding land can absorb.
Chicken manure can be a useful fertiliser. But on this scale, it becomes an industrial waste hazard.
Way too much chicken manure has been spread on the land around the River Wye for decades - which means we now have a legacy problem, with our soils overloaded with nutrients, which leaches out every time it rains.
Over 4000 local people have joined a legal claim against the largest poultry company in the area - Avara Foods - accusing it of polluting the river with poultry manure. Avara deny the charge and the case may take years to play out in court, but I mention it to show the strength of feeling on this issue. It’s the largest environmental pollution claim in the country.
To give credit - Avara Foods - part-owned by Cargill - acknowledged a few years ago that it’s part of the problem on the Wye and says it is now exporting most of its manure out of the Wye catchment. This is a welcome change for the river, but it’s a sticking plaster solution that involves lorry loads of chicken manure being driven across the country. The best solution would be to keep fewer chickens in the area, so we could import less feed and export less manure.
Ultimately, what’s happened on the Wye is a failure of regulation. Local authorities and environmental agencies should never have allowed so many poultry farms to be built in one area, with no plan to deal with all the waste.
Avara is exporting its manure voluntarily, but for how long? Other poultry companies in the area aren’t exporting their manure - and that means that farmers might choose to leave Avara, and supply another poultry company instead. There’s no level playing field, so we’re at the whim of private companies.
Right now, there’s no penalty for pollution. The farming rules that are meant to prevent spreading more manure than the land needs go largely unpoliced and unenforced.
We need government action to enforce farming rules and ensure that pollution is no longer profitable.
But just as we’re crying out for government action to protect us from the excesses of factory farming - we hear that the government is working with the poultry industry to create a Poultry Growth Strategy to expand production.
Honestly, for us on the River Wye, this is a betrayal. It would be a disaster.
Everyone I talk to about this is shocked. Incredulous. Horrified.
The argument that producing more chicken here will improve our food security is insanity. The chickens might be in British buildings, but much of what we’re feeding them comes from overseas. We’re importing soy from South America for these birds. This is a real risk to our food security, making us more dependent on importing crops from abroad.
With harvests failing around the world, we need to use food as efficiently as possible - and that means eating more plants and fewer animals.
The first duty of government is to protect its people. Our food security is vital. We need to be growing more food for ourselves here and making our system more resilient.
Demand for chicken is rising right now - but that can change. The government, like all politicians, is understandably nervous about the idea of telling people what to eat. But government doesn’t need to tell people what to eat, it just needs to let people know what they’re eating.
If the government introduced honest labelling, I think consumer habits would change. Right now, organic and free-range chickens are labelled, but most chicken sold carries no label. What if there was a label for ‘intensive indoor’ chicken, so buyers could picture the buildings where tens of thousands of birds are crammed together indoors for their short 5 week lives? Would demand for cheap chicken keep soaring? Or might we choose to eat less of it and pay a bit more for something better?
The government needs a strategy for THAT. For supporting us to eat less but better chicken. For making us more food secure. And for helping farmers to produce food in a way that works for nature, including our rivers.
I’ve come from the River Wye to ask every MP here to please do all you can to stop this Poultry Sector Growth Plan and rethink it.
