UK farmers are often left with less than 1p on produce and see less than 1% of the profit, according to a new report.
Food and farming charity Sustain looked into five everyday amounts of food including apples, cheese, beef burgers, carrots and bread in its latest report, ‘Unpicking Food Prices: Where does your food pound go and why do farmers get so little?’.
For a loaf of sliced bread, Sustain found that a farmer spends 9.03p, however recieved 0.09p profit on a selling price of £1.14, whereas for a loaf of Real Bread sold in an independent bakery, they make 0.5p profit.
For four beef burgers, the charity found the processor gains ten times the profit of the beef farmer and a carrot grower spending 14p per bag and selling to a supermarket supply chain would get almost negligable returns.
As a result, Sustian is calling on the government to change supply chain regulations and make them fairer for farmers, for regional structural funds to invest in more infrastructure such as hubs and local processing that can shorten chains to see farmers receiveing more value, and for more transparency in food chains.
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“It is astonishing how little of the money we pay for our food ends up in the hands of the farmers and growers,” Sustain head of farming, Vicki Hird said.
“Farmers carry a lot of risk and work in difficult conditions to put food on our table. We also expect them to look after our landscape and our nature – and want them to do more of that in the future including protecting nature and helping to cut 30% of food based climate changing greenhouse gas emissions.
Hird added :”If we’re to give our farmers the chance to change how we produce food, they need to keep more of the value so they can invest and use new approaches. We should not let intermediaries and food buyers hold all the bargaining chips.
“Crucially, our report shows that paying farmers more need not mean higher food prices so retailers cannot use that excuse – there would be little impact on many products’ retail prices if farmers were paid more. We make strong recommendations on investing in better routes to market, regulating all supply chains, and building transparency.”
