The Price of Meat

Buy a pack of beef in the supermarket and you’ll find it’s increased in price by 52% in five years. Try and trade down to some chicken and you’ll find it’s nearly doubled in just two years. Make a product unaffordable- whether that’s cigarettes, brandy or steak- and you inevitably open up the door to smugglers. Evidence isn’t hard to find with Dover Port Authority offering up just one snapshot. In September 2025 they seized 20 tonnes of illegal meat, compared with just 1.3 tonnes in September 2022. Extrapolate the numbers with unchecked cargoes and the UK’s other ports and it’s clear that hundreds of tonnes of illegal meat are reaching our shores every month.

This isn’t just a tax issue with cheeky smugglers making a few quid as they sell a roasting joint in a local pub. It’s a major risk to the UK economy. Some of the meat is coming from areas suffering from African Swine Fever or Foot and Mouth disease. There’s no way that this meat could enter Britain legally because of the fear of these diseases reaching the UK. The last major Foot and Mouth disease outbreak in the UK in 2001 led to the slaughter of 6 million cattle and sheep and nauseating pyres of animals burning beside the M6.

Charlotte Smith travels to Romania to trace some of the many routes that meat can take to enter the UK and talks to customs and food standards officials in search of a solution to this significant risk to public health and to the UK's food and farming economy.

Producer: Beatrice Fenton