Pile it high and sell it cheap

Opposite, from top left:

1 April 2009, Brazil: Marfrig slaughterhouse facilities. ©Ricardo Funari/Lineair/ Greenpeace

9 September 2014, Germany: Chicken fattening. ©Fred Dott/ Greenpeace

10 April 2017, Germany: Meat on supermarket shelves. ©Bodo Marks/ Greenpeace

6 June 2019, São Paulo, Brazil: Fast food at KFC. ©Barbara Veiga/ Greenpeace

24 September 2019, New York, USA: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson holds bilateral meeting with US President Donald Trump. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craiughead) The slogan of Tesco’s founder, Jack Cohen – ‘Pile it high and sell it cheap’18 – emphasises the importance of large turnover and low price over environmental protection, workers’ rights or food quality – a business model that even today characterises most large supermarket chains. There is an obvious link between the mass merchandising approach of supermarkets and fast food companies and the rapid expansion of industrial meat production. For instance, rising UK consumption of poultry – the livestock whose production is the most industrialised and which consumes the most industrial feed19 – has been partly fuelled by supermarkets competing to sell the cheapest chicken. Industry reports indicate a strong correlation between marketing ploys such as special offers and increases in chicken sales.20

Fast food companies, pursuing a similar strategy, account for an even greater proportion of the UK’s chicken sales: in 2019, the UK spent £1.6 billion ($2 billion) on chicken in supermarkets and £2.3 billion ($2.9 billion) in chicken shops such as Kentucky Fried Chicken.21 Retail price cuts, and the resultant need both to slash production costs and to increase output in order to meet rising demand, have perpetuated a cycle of industrialisation and intensification,22 with much of the environmental and social cost being externalised to feed-producing countries in South America and elsewhere.

Moreover, the impact of the industrial meat sector goes far beyond the footprint of its operations in wealthy Western countries, as it has an extensive and growing worldwide presence. Fast food companies in particular are expanding particularly aggressively in countries with below-average meat consumption, such as China and India.23

The industrial meat sector is also increasingly being used as a weapon in trade negotiations, notably in the context of Brexit. In 2019 negotiations, for example, the UK’s minister in charge of preparing for a possible no-deal Brexit, Michael Gove, proposed to introduce non-tariff quotas on Brazilian beef, allowing Brazilian producers to undercut Irish exports, if the Irish government did not drop its insistence on the Brexit ‘backstop’.24 Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s negotiating team has warned that the USA will not sign a trade deal with the UK unless the latter opens its doors to US meat, which would mean a lowering of current UK food safety and animal welfare standards, which are based on EU standards.25

The UK government has so far refused to write these standards into UK law, despite calls from the National Farmers’ Union and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and Secretary of State for International Trade Liz Truss has supported a US trade deal on the grounds that it would lead to cheaper fertiliser, pesticides and animal feed26 – all agricultural inputs that are central to industrial meat production and whose use needs to be reduced to tackle the climate and nature emergency.