Taste, Trade and Technology

The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840

Richard Perren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351896085
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Focusing on the interactions of producers, sellers and consumers of meat across the world, Richard Perren elucidates aspects of the evolution of the international economy and the part played by the investment of capital and the enterprise of individuals. The study utilises the government reports and papers issued by all countries involved in the meat trade, including North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Britain. Beginning in the nineteenth century allows a comprehensive analysis of how an efficient meat exporting industry was built. The industry required investment, which was part of the general process of economic development. Perren focuses on the nature of the firms involved with the trade, the part played in the industry's development by foreign investment and the encouragement given by governments. Close attention is also paid to the stimulus of war, the impact of animal health and food hygiene regulations on producers and the competing demands of interest groups involved in the food businesses. By taking an historical as well as a contemporary approach, the book contributes to the current discussion on the effectiveness of animal and meat inspection in identifying farm livestock diseases such as tuberculosis and BSE. This study advances our knowledge of the process of food distribution in the industrialising and post-industrial economies, and leads to a comprehensive understanding of an important component of the international food chain.

PART 1
1840 to 1914

Chapter 1
New Suppliers

The Growth of Unsatisfied Demand

Relationships within the international meat industry are best understood in terms of two complementary sets of regions: one of them is the regions of surplus production and insufficient demand, while the other comprises those of deficit production and surplus demand. These regions have not always remained constant and have been subject to changes, some of which have been long term and permanent, but others short term and temporary. The long-term shifts have been the result of population changes and economic growth. But the short-term shifts have mainly been brought about by international conflict and national politics.

For all of the nineteenth century Western Europe was an area of insufficient production and surplus demand. The dramatic growth of population was relieved to some extent by emigration, but even so in some countries definite shortages of foodstuffs started to emerge. They were most pronounced in Great Britain where population increased from approximately 10.5 million in 1800 to 41 million by 1911. Ireland also grew rapidly from 6.8 million in 1791 to about 8.5 million on the eve of the famine, which checked the rate of natural increase and encouraged emigration after 1848. The rate of increase was generally not so rapid for the rest of Europe. For the countries of the West, that is modern Austria, France, Belgium, Holland and Scandinavia, population rose from approximately 59 million to 155 million from 1800 to 1910.¹ As these were the countries that experienced the greatest advances in industrialization and economic growth, the potential increase in the market for meat, and all other foodstuffs was immense. Southern Europe did not exhibit the same appetite for meat, as the terrain would only support much lower densities of livestock than Northern Europe and so Mediterranean diets always involved much lower meat consumption. Again, the low levels of economic growth and lack of modem industry South of the Alps preserved traditional patterns of diet with their high levels of cereal consumption.

The growth of world trade in meat and livestock after 1850 depended on the increase in effective demand and the development of technology to allow that demand to be satisfied. On the demand side it has to be noted that the demand for food is relatively inelastic, that is the proportion of a family's income spent on total food shrinks as its income rises.² But as incomes rise there is a change in the type of food purchased. Families with low incomes have to devote a high proportion of their food expenditure to cheap energy giving cereals, but those with high incomes can afford to trade up and spend more on the expensive high protein animal food products.³ The rise in personal incomes as a result of industrial and commercial development from 1850 up to 1914 meant considerable trading up to high value food products, among them meat. There was thus a growing market for all types of meat, but especially the better qualities.

Industrial growth was accompanied by increasing urbanisation and, as urban incomes are higher than rural incomes, the transfer of population from the countryside to the town reinforced the growth of demand. People living in the countryside supply a certain amount of their own foodstuffs, but modern urban consumers expect to purchase all their food requirements. The rise of the Western European consumer society was thus a vital part of the increase in the size of the market. The measurement of price and income elasticity for meat is not easy, because it is not a homogeneous commodity and different types and qualities are substitutes for each other. However, Capie's econometric study of British consumption patterns in the 1920s and 1930s reveal price and income elasticity of meat greater than unity.⁴ This means that a 1 per cent rise in incomes, or a 1 per cent fall in meat prices, caused consumption of meat to increase by more than 1 per cent, a relationship that held true throughout the nineteenth century.

There are signs that some parts of Western Europe were experiencing food shortages by the 1840s. There was widespread evidence of malnutrition among conscripts into the French army from Alsace between the 1830s and the end of the 1850s, only becoming less frequent from the 1860s.⁵ The country that felt the shortage of meat most of all was probably Britain. After 1850 the meat supply situation there became progressively more difficult. One farming magazine, published in the mid-1860s. blamed Britain's high mutton prices on the heavy mortality amongst the sheep breeding flocks in the severe winters of 1860 and 1861, and high beef prices on the heavy incidence of imported livestock disease amongst cattle.⁶

F.M.L. Thompson has recently observed that British farmers 'seem to have bumped up against some kind of beef productivity [barrier] as early as the 1850s', and E.J.T. Collins has recently described these years as the 'mid-Victorian meat famine'.⁷ Collins, Thompson, and the present author agree that between the 1840s and 1870s there was almost no increase in home meat output, whereas we know that census-based estimates for England and Wales between 1840 and 1875 show that population was growing at 1.21 per cent per annum. Price evidence also shows a steady upward trend in English and Scottish meat prices from as early as 1828 to 1865.⁸ By the 1860s meetings were held in various places to discuss the 'meat question' and in 1863 the Society of Arts had offered a medal and a £70 prize for an invention that allowed the long distance transport of fresh meat.⁹ The outcry rose to fever pitch at the height of the industrial boom of the 1870s. The Agricultural Gazette of 1 November 1873 reported that Britain's 'meat supply is becoming the most important problem of the day, and its satisfactory solution is almost impossible.'¹⁰

The constraints upon increase in output to meet this rising Western European demand were the availability of land to extend livestock farming and the cost to other branches of agricultural production. From the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century there was already a substantial, though variable, east-west European trade in animals and animal products. At the end of the fifteenth century the North German towns received cattle from the plains of Hungary, and as far as the Black Sea coast, when this route was not blocked by the Turks, and there was also a trade from Poland and Russia. In the sixteenth century large numbers of 'Friesian cattle' were driven from the Danish North Sea marshlands to markets in Holland and north and central Germany.¹¹ The coming of the railways after 1840 had speeded up the transport process so that by 1866 the ports of Hamburg and Rotterdam were the terminal stations of a great network of main German railway lines and branch lines that ran into Hungary, Poland and Galicia, and by the end of the decade they were expected to extend as far as the Bessarabian frontier.¹² Along these cattle, sheep and pigs could be brought from the furthest regions to feed the main great population centres of Northern Europe.

But by the start of the nineteenth century this trade was already approaching the limits set by livestock supplies and available land to feed them, even without the further barriers imposed by periodic outbreaks of conflict in the region, such as the Crimean War which was thought to have reduced the numbers of European sheep coining to Britain between 1853 and 1856.¹³ The Economist commented on the high price of meat as early as 1853, observing that there was no need for the British farmer to be afraid of imports of foreign livestock as they were having no effect in keeping down meat prices.¹⁴ Meat was dear in the mid-1860s because the working class were earning good wages and creating 'a largely increased and effective demand for meat.' Nor was much relief to be expected from the steady increase in supplies of imported meat as 'foreign stock both in condition and quality are much inferior to English ... and the climate of Europe - hot in summer and severely cold in winter - presents obstacles to stock breeding and feeding not easily to be overcome.'¹⁵ Although the railways - and steamships - speeded up the process of supplying meat to Northern Europe and reduced the weight losses caused by when drovers walked the animals overland, they did not cause any substantial increase in the area of supply. For that to occur, completely fresh regions of meat supply outside Europe had to be brought into production.

Characteristics of New Suppliers

There were four important overseas sources of meat in the nineteenth century, the United States and to some extent Canada, the South American countries of Argentina and Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand, Together they made up the substantial proportion of the regions that saw the migration of nearly 50 million Europeans who emigrated to the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and only Africa was not a serious contributor to this aspect of international trade. Thus the establishment and progress of this stage of the international meat industry was very much a matter of general European imperial and colonial development. But they all achieved their necessary levels of economic growth to become suppliers of meat, along with other primary products, in rather different ways. As they did not each start from the same set of preconditions their early strategies for economic development were different. If one were to generalize it seems that all the countries of recent settlement had to undergo three elements of internal change to establish the domestic conditions necessary for them to set up as exporters of meat and other products. It would be misleading to see these as precise chronological stages because all overlapped in time rather than following on in succession. But they all eventually required the following:

• the establishment of a firm and stable system of internal politics and government, to guarantee property rights, and reassure settlers and investors that their assets would be protected;
• the necessary military power to guard against any threat of hostility from indigenous peoples;
• the presence of a sufficiently large settler population to establish an internal market and reinforce the rule of law.

Together, these provided a necessary environment to attract sufficient businessmen endowed with the entrepreneurial spirit and venture capital, necessary to establish a network of modern transport systems and meat processing plants.

But each of the regions that were to become important international meat suppliers did so for rather different reasons and in different ways. Geography and climate varied, as did patterns of settlement before the nineteenth century, and each had inherited its own particular cultural and political forms. Each looked distinctly unpromising in 1840. All were thinly settled, and still in the process of subduing their indigenous inhabitants. Australia was still not a nation, only a series of widely scattered small colonies hardly linked at all overland, and both they and New Zealand had only small urban centres. The United States was already in the early stages of establishing its transport system, while large parts of Argentina and Uruguay, the main South American meat producers, were still characterized by lawlessness and terror. In Australia and New Zealand the problems of internal political stability were never serious. The United States only suffered one serious disruption of civil war in the 1860s, though this was speedily overcome. But in South America political instability and poor government was far more s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• General Editor's Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 1840 to 1914
• Part 2 1914 to 1945
• Part 3 1945 to the Present
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index