As the turkey flies, it is about 800 miles in a refrigerated lorry from the
town of Sarvar in western Hungary to the “bootiful” processing plants of
Bernard Matthews in Holton, Suffolk. It is a long journey and an unexpected
one, not only for the turkeys.
To the public Bernard Matthews (BM) has long portrayed itself as a
quintessentially British company whose birds are reared amid the rural
charms of eastern England. It is a key facet of the BM brand and one the
group clearly had every intention of maintaining despite the facts when bird
flu was first detected at its UK facilities eight days ago.
“All our birds are British,” said a spokesman for the company. “They are home
grown. The fact that we have a Hungarian operation is immaterial.”
In case that was not enough, the firm later added: “All the turkeys had
British mums and dads and the eggs are grown by us and the chicks are put in
the sheds.”
It is one thing for the public to have been fooled but quite another for the
hapless Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). It knew
of the imports and it knew that Hungary had had a outbreak of bird flu in
January, but for the first week of the crisis it continued to tell anyone
who would listen that the most likely source was migrating wild birds.
In a fiasco that brought back memories of BSE and foot and mouth, farmers
across Britain were put on alert to watch out for infected wild birds, while
BM was allowed to carry on blithely importing turkey parts from Hungary at a
rate of 40 tons a week. The authorities now fear the products may have ended
up on supermarket shelves across the country.
Leading avian experts were fuming. They pointed out that birds which migrate
from Hungary to Britain mostly arrive before Christmas, not in preparation
for spring. And a mild winter across Europe had made the chances of birds
migrating to British shores even slimmer.
One leading ornithologist and government adviser (who asked not to be named)
said: “I find it quite incredible. Everybody who knows anything about birds
would be shocked if this was the source. They would be scratching their
heads and going ‘man, this is bizarre’.”
Not the government. When David Miliband, secretary of state for the
environment, rose to brief MPs on the bird flu outbreak last Monday, he
stated confidently that there was no connection with Hungary, despite some
experts already raising the possibility of a link.
“The chicks [at the Suffolk farm] all came from within this country, so there
is no Hungarian connection of that sort,” he said. “The factory involved in
the Hungarian outbreak was not a Bernard Matthews factory.” The truth, it
turns out, could not be more different. Hundreds of tons of the meat sold in
Britain by BM comes from Hungary and has long done so. Moreover, the deadly
H5N1 bird flu virus identified in Suffolk is identical to the strain that
forced the cull of thousands of birds in Hungary only last month, experts
have confirmed.
“It beggars belief that the government could have been so casual about the
virus being brought in on imported meat,” said Peter Ainsworth, the shadow
environment secretary, yesterday. “The government appears guilty of
extraordinary complacency.” INSIDE the huge sheds that form the BM complex
in Suffolk, a turkey’s lot is not a happy one. An undercover reporter from
The Sunday Times spent 12 days working at BM in 1998 and saw harsh treatment
of some birds, which were housed in sheds that held up to 17,000 at a time.
The paper reported at the time workers talking about playing cruel games with
the birds including “bagpiping”, in which a bird was held under the arm and
squeezed sharply, squirting excrement over other workers.
Last year animal rights activists caught workers playing similar games on
film. A video on YouTube shows workers apparently playing “baseball” with
the turkeys. One worker tosses bird after bird in the air while another bats
them savagely in mid-air with a stick.
The company said these were isolated incidents and that any workers found
committing abuse would be instantly sacked.
Being an employee in the turkey manufacturing process is no picnic either.
Many manual workers are recruited from Portugal and work on lines where they
are forbidden to talk and wear different coloured hats to denote their
status. Yellow hats, the basic workers, earn about £200 a week.
In chilled conditions the birds have to be bled, gutted, deboned and packed.
It is cold work and physically demanding.
“It’s slavery. The work was disgusting,” said one former worker last week who
had worked on a line removing offal. “You’d cut into the bird and sometimes
you’d have blood [spurt] on your face.”
However, for many employees it is better paid than the jobs available in
Portugal.
“The bird flu doesn’t scare me,” said Vanessa Sofia, 28, who came from
Portugal to work at BM. “What I worry about is people not buying Bernard
Matthews and losing my job. I like my work.”
She has reason to worry. Bird flu and the bungled handling of it have put the
company under severe pressure.
Sales of turkey products at supermarkets are down by about 10% and the Food
Standards Agency is investigating whether meat contaminated with bird flu
has entered the food chain. It is also reported to be considering a recall
of turkey products from stores.
Although infected meat that is properly cooked poses no risk to human health,
raw meat does. The authorities are also worried that infected meat scraps
that are thrown away could transmit the virus to domestic pets or wild
animals.
It is not surprising the public is suspicious, say critics, because the
government, the company and the farming lobby have been less than open about
the potential source of the virus. MUCH of BM’s imported meat comes from the
Hungarian town of Sarvar, a modest place that retains a smart hall in a
central square, an old castle and a fine church. Elderly Austrians like to
pop over the border to stay at the spa and “take the waters”.
A short walk soon takes visitors into a world where decades of neglect under
former Soviet dominion are evident. Paint peels off walls, roofs sag and
potholes scatter the roads.
At the edge of town is the Saga Foods meat processing plant — a huge
grey-green corrugated iron structure that was once the state-owned poultry
processing company. Bought in 1993 by BM, it has undergone refurbishment but
remains looking grimly industrial.
The plant is capable of churning out 36,000 virsli ever hour. Virsli are a
cheap sausage, usually made out of poultry meat, that is popular in Hungary.
Its distinctive smell pervades the nearby streets where tatty trucks used
for transporting live poultry last week stood parked.
Saga also sends truckloads of semi-processed turkey meat to BM in Britain.
This meat is then packaged in East Anglia and sold in British supermarkets
as BM products.
Bart Dalla Mura, the commercial director of BM, was keen to play down any
problem with the Saga operation last week. He emphasised that the plant was
160 miles away from the bird flu outbreak that had happened in Hungary and
therefore could not be the source of the infection.
Once again it was not the whole truth. Investigations reveal that the plant in
Sarvar has various sources of poultry and meat and sometimes sends birds for
processing at other facilities. One is a company called Gallfood, which
operates a slaughterhouse at Kecskemet in eastern Hungary. This is just 30
miles from the area where H5N1 was found.
Late last week BM admitted to The Sunday Times that Gallfood was the source of
some 20 tons of turkey meat which had been sent to its Suffolk plant just
before the outbreak of H5N1.
According to Miklos Suth, the chief vet of Hungary, the Kecskemet plant
dispatched 290 tons of turkey breast to Britain in the past year. It also
sent 1,000 tons of turkey products for processing at BM’s Saga plant in
Sarvar.
“It seems that Bernard Matthews has been wanting to slaughter a lot of
turkeys — more than the company has capacity for at its own slaughterhouse,”
said Suth.
“Bernard Matthews’ plant is in Sarvar but it was using the Gallfood
slaughterhouse in Kecskemet.”
The H5N1 virus has now been found at four of the giant sheds at the BM’s
British plan in Holton — making it even more unlikely that the source was a
wild bird that just happened to get into one of the sheds, as the company
and government had initially suggested.
Yet even as BM began gassing 160,000 exposed birds last week, it was still
importing poultry from Hungary — with Defra’s approval. The meat was turned
into steaks; the company says it does not yet know whether they were
delivered to shops.
Consumer confidence, not surprisingly, has once again been shaken.
Shopping at a Tesco in west London, Patricia Nunez, a 27-year-old
administrator, said: “I usually have no worries about buying meat. But I’m
not buying turkey at the moment. I’m not sure the government has done or
said enough.”
