By Richard Griffiths, chief executive, British Poultry Council
The Government has launched its ‘Be Ready’ campaign, encouraging households to prepare for emergencies by keeping three days’ worth of food, water, and other essential supplies. It’s sensible advice. Power cuts happen, water supplies fail. Being prepared is simply common sense.
But it got me thinking about something rather broader. When did we become so accustomed to things not working properly that our response became learning how to cope, rather than working out how to make them better?
We’ve spent much of the past decade learning to make do.
In poultry, we’re particularly good at it. When circumstances change, we adapt. When costs rise, we find efficiencies. When infrastructure lets us down, we develop contingencies. We keep producing food because people depend on us, and because stopping isn’t really an option.
There’s considerable pride to be taken in that ingenuity and determination. Yet I wonder whether our ability to keep going has gradually become part of the problem.
Every workaround takes time, money, and effort. And every year spent navigating the same obstacles is another year in which we could have been making progress.
Look at planning, infrastructure, investment, or the availability of people and skills. These aren’t new challenges. We’ve been discussing many of them for years, often with remarkable consistency.
This is where I think we need to reconsider what we mean by resilience. Of course, we must be capable of withstanding shocks and maintaining essential services. But resilience shouldn’t mean accepting that things will always be difficult.
That requires something we’ve perhaps lost through years of political and economic uncertainty: the willingness to make decisions, accept that not everyone will agree, and get on with delivering them.
Government has responsibilities here, certainly. But so does industry. We cannot continually criticise the absence of progress while allowing our own ambitions to shrink to whatever seems achievable within today’s constraints.
The poultry sector has enormous potential to contribute to Britain’s food security, economic growth, and future prosperity. Realising that potential requires more than keeping the lights on.
We’ve demonstrated, time and again, that we know how to keep going. Now we need to use that experience to remind government that keeping going isn’t enough, and that moving forward requires ambition, decisions, and action.