Avara Foods, a leading supplier of chicken to Tesco, is being urged by campaigners to pay reparations to help clean up the River Wye.
The Wye, a river running from mid-Wales to the Severn estuary, has been affected by increasing algal blooms. These are partly caused by poultry farms spreading more manure than the land can absorb, say scientists, leading to excess phosphorus leaching into waterways.
Avara Foods is responsible for more than 16 million of the 20 million chickens reared in the Wye catchment, which has seen a surge in chicken numbers over the past two decades.
The company recently announced a plan promising that by 2025, its supply chain would “not contribute to excess phosphate in the River Wye”. However, clean river campaigners say that that is not enough.
Last month, one of Avara’s joint owners, the US food giant Cargill, lost a court case in the US and was held responsible for polluting the Illinois River with poultry manure. The companies have until mid March to reach an agreement with the state of Oklahoma on how they will work to remedy the pollution’s effects, which included algal blooms.
Campaigners say the US court ruling sets an example and that Avara now needs to pay for cleaning up the River Wye.
“It is time that Avara committed to paying to restore the Wye as a matter of urgency. The principle of ‘the polluter pays’ should apply here just as it does in America,” said Richard Tyler of campaign group Save the Wye.
Avara has said it is its chicken suppliers rather than the company itself that applies poultry manure to the land, and that “the excess phosphate in the Wye arises from a significant number of producers and users in the catchment – of whom we are but one”.
However, the company’s new plan pledges to introduce “more robust nutrient, soil and manure management standards” that would export more manure out of the river catchment and ensure its poultry waste will only be spread on land in the area when there is evidence it is needed.
Avara told the Guardian that it had not determined how its stricter standards would be independently verified and upheld, but that it would welcome greater regulation and enforcement from environmental agencies.
The company claims to have reduced phosphate in its poultry feed by 27% since 2016, yet it also significantly expanded production over that period, putting millions more birds into the Wye catchment.
Scientists have recommended reducing overall bird numbers in the region, but Avara said this was not on its agenda.
“There’s a continued demand for meat. There is no signal out there that says stop and cut back. We’re serving the consumer. If we didn’t produce [chicken meat] here, it would be imported,” Avara’s agricultural director John Reed said.
The US court ruling against Avara’s joint owner Cargill stated that the company had known since the 1980s about the damaging effects to rivers of phosphorus in poultry manure and yet continued to allow its manure to be applied to the land without any appropriate management.
In 2004, Cargill took out newspaper advertisements which appeared to promise to develop nutrient management standards and reduce the amount of poultry litter applied within the watershed by exporting more manure out of the area.
Avara said its own plan was “based on the individual circumstances of the Wye and the nature of our supply chain within it”.
The US lawsuit was filed in 2005, and while the trial ended in 2009, it has taken 13 years for the ruling to be given by the judge.
Paul Withers professor of catchment biogeochemistry at Lancaster University said that past applications of manures and fertilisers had created a legacy of phosphorus in Wye catchment soils that would “continue to leak into the river for many years”.
A spokesperson for Avara said the company was focused on supporting projects that created “economically viable alternatives to spreading manure on the land, while working to establish independent standards for soil and nutrient management for any manure from our supply chain put on the land.”
The spokesperson added: “Improving the condition of the Wye will not only require action from all producers, it will require credible solutions that allow arable farming in the area to thrive without the need for excess phosphate or other nutrients. Without this, our product will simply be replaced with another.”
Charles Watson, chair of the charity River Action, said the lack of any robust regulatory framework to monitor and police Avara’s proposed solutions was “clearly a huge issue”.
“Also, as these mitigations are finally implemented, the debate will have to move on to the need for these self-confessed polluters to pay the necessary reparations to help restore the river to its former natural state. In this regard, the US ruling sets for the Wye an intriguing precedent.”
A spokesperson for Tesco said it was “committed to playing our part in ensuring the protection of the River Wye, alongside other actors across the food industry”.
