Campaign chairman believes wool has warm future

Wool is back in fashion and among the beneficiaries are sheep farmers who for the first time for a number of years will see some cash left after paying the shearers.

That was the upbeat message from John Thorley, chairman of the Campaign for Wool, speaking at a fashion event this week.

He said he believed the recent rise in the value of wool would continue and part of this would be due to the success of the Campaign for Wool, which has the support of the world’s major wool producing countries.

Catwalks this autumn would see wool garments featured strongly he said, both in military styles and in “granny chic” cardigans.

He also stressed the strong environmental credentials of wool production, with sheep as users of the hills and the wool working as recyclable carbon stores.

Thorley is a former chief executive of the National Sheep Association and yesterday his successor, Phil Stocker, called for an urgent review of the European imposed regulations on sheep identification.

This is the latest move in a long-running wrangle which most recently has seen the failure of the German sheep farmers’ legal challenge to the EU regulation.

Stocker said that almost nine years ago in 2003 the NSA had made it clear that it supported electronic ID (EID) in sheep, “as long as the application was both workable and affordable”.

This policy was based on the belief that electronic identification would help trace movements and then lead to reduced risk of disease spread and give confidence to sheep markets.

“Unfortunately the decision on zero tolerance ignores the difficult relationship between IT technology and living creatures, and is not considered affordable by a farmer who receives an automatic financial penalty for inaccuracy.

“Sheep farmers feel completely betrayed in having a system imposed on them where they are penalised for the technology not being 100 per cent reliable.”

Having been rejected in the courts, he said the NSA was now trying to galvanise support for a review of the regulation at EU level.

John Geldard, NSA chairman said: “The only way forward is to get this regulation reviewed because it is clear that it is not working. We cannot have a situation where large mixed farms are turned away from sheep because they put their entire CAP payments at risk.

“That is not helping farming to develop to address the needs of food security and sustainability. NSA is now aware that there are a growing number of EU member states that are realising that EID with zero tolerance is not working.

“The more member states and organisations that speak up and join forces the less the regulators can ignore our views”.