Slow-food producers regulated to extinction
This is the price to be paid for cheap food. The farmers who produce them are probably not wealthy.
Even in Ireland, chicken farmers keep their fowl in overcrowded conditions, administering constant medication in an effort to keep them growing fast enough and disease at bay.
It is not a very lucrative business, however.
The public, on the whole, are not prepared to pay the cost of slow-growing fowl reared in healthy and happy conditions, even though they are a better and more delicious food. Diseases start in intensive production.
The real scandal, however, is that smallholders who love their poultry and produce delicious eggs and table fowl in a traditional way are now almost all regulated out of existence, thus forcing the public to buy only from intensive producers, except in farmers’ markets.
Do we blame our local authorities, national legislators, or our EU representatives?
This is a curtailment of our freedom.
Myrtle Allen, Jill Bell, Caroline Robinson
Cork Free Choice Consumer Group
Shanagarry
Co Cork
