Who pays the price for cheap eggs?

TAKE a look at the front page of this newspaper. Fold it in half. Now fold it in half again. What you are now looking at - a quarter of the original page - is roughly the same area in which a battery hen spends almost its entire life.

More than 24 million hens live in these conditions in Britain today, laying 72 per cent of the ten billion eggs produced in this country every year.

The hens enter these cages almost as soon as they reach puberty and start laying eggs, at around 18 weeks. They leave them when they become less productive, about a year later. Although they will still lay, they are not as profitable as younger hens and are taken to processing factories, usually to be turned into dog food.

Few people would suggest that it is a happy life for the hens. Almost all battery hens have the ends of their beaks sliced off with red hot wire to stop them pecking other birds in their distress, although sometimes their desperation overrides the pain and quite severe fights are the result.

"These birds can't express any kind of natural behaviour. They can't stretch their wings, they can't dust-bath, they can't preen properly, and these are all things that are absolutely essential to the well-being of any kinds of hens," says Kirsty Pettman, campaigns officer for Compassion in World Farming (CIWF).

"The hens become quite agitated and sometimes aggressive, and there are instances of quite severe fighting and cannibalism.

"And because these birds don't exercise at all, they get brittle bones. By the time they're a year old, many of them have several broken bones and some have been living with broken bones in their cages for some time."

CIWF has been at the forefront of attempts to try and eradicate battery farming, and it is a campaign which has had some success. A 1999 EU directive laid the way for the eventual banning of conventional battery cages from 2012, although it still left the door open to so-called enriched cages.

These cages have been held up by the egg industry as a more welfare-friendly alternative, although even these are now under threat.

Agriculture minister Elliot Morley this week announced a public consultation exercise which could see the enriched cages banned within five years. The egg industry fears that this could lead to a flood of imports from countries which do no adhere to Britain's welfare standards, as domestic producers are forced to raise their prices as they move to less intensive methods.

But this argument cuts no ice with CIWF, which sees this as a reason to tighten up free trade rules rather than accept sub-standard imports. And, in any case, it argues that enriched cages are barely an improvement on conventional cages.

"The difference between the two cages is absolutely minimal, and in terms of extra space, it is comparable to the size of a postcard," says Kirsty Pettman. "The enriched cages offer no worthwhile welfare benefits at all - the hens would still spend their entire lives in a cage."

The enriched cages are 45cm high, instead of the 40cm of the conventional cage, and include a perch 7cm off the ground. But with the hens losing 7cm of space to sit on the perch, they will actually have 2cm less in the enriched cage, leaving them with even less of the 56cm of headroom they need, according to CIWF research.

But the egg industry claims the enriched cages now on trial are a vast improvement on the earlier models examined by the CIWF. Cages taking up to 20 birds each would offer private nesting areas and enough room for the hens to flap their wings, although not all at once.

"It is rather premature to write-off the enriched cages," says Andrew Joret, deputy chairman of the British Egg Information Council (BEIC). "It is an emotional response because they don't like birds in cages."

He says the enriched cages would offer each bird 750sq cm of space, compared with 450sq cm of the conventional battery cages. And they would also provide a scratching post and do away with the wire floor, which irritates the birds' feet and prevents them from pecking the ground.

But he makes no bones about the fact that the argument for retaining the cages is purely economic.

"We are basically self-sufficient in eggs in the UK, and all this would do is see a significant chunk of our market lost to other countries," he says.

"The production system is not determined by the producer, it is determined by the consumer. It is whether people are going to pay more. Some people will pay more, and we're very happy to produce for those people, but there is still a majority who only buy on price, and there is an argument to say why should low-income consumers be forced to pay more than they need to?"

He says free-range eggs cost roughly double cage eggs, although CIWF claims the difference is 1p per egg. Mr Joret claims this discrepancy is due to taking into account the small eggs which will not sell in the shops, but still have to be paid for.

But a request to visit a battery farm to observe the conditions first hand was turned down, on the grounds that such farms had been the victims of bad publicity in the past, and would only be "stitched up" if they were to expose their practices to public scrutiny.

While battery eggs still account for more than 70 per cent of the UK market, CIWF believes that animal welfare is becoming increasingly important in consumer choice. Around 23 per cent of eggs are free range, laid by hens free to roam outside, and another five per cent are barn eggs, where the hens are kept in barns but free to wander, nest and perch.

Supermarkets are also getting the message. Marks & Spencer now stock only free-range eggs and use only free-range in their ready meals and pre-packaged food. Waitrose only sells barn eggs and free-range eggs, and has indicated it wants to follow M&S's lead in its food range.

"I think it is getting through into buying patterns, and I really think that the public care about hens and farm welfare," says Kirsty.

'Consumers have proved that is the way they feel by influencing two supermarkets to sell only free-range eggs. Other supermarkets are making moves to phase out battery eggs completely."

But until battery farming is banned, those 24 million hens will continue to live in a space less than the size of an A4 piece of paper. In the year they are allowed to live, each bird will lay about 300 eggs, almost one a day. When their productivity falls off, their lives come to an end. Free- range hens could expect to live for around six years.

But not all hens hatched to suppliers of battery farms are destined for the cages. At a day old, the hatchlings are placed on a conveyor belt and sexed. While the females are sent to a life behind bars, the males are taken out and gassed. Perhaps they are the lucky ones.