Free market capitalism just isn't for the birds

We have a complaint here about broiler hens. On a moral basis it might even be somewhere between fair and true. As economics it’s desperately unobservant.

“Frankenchickens”, as campaigners have dubbed them, reach maturity 12 weeks quicker and can be up to twice the size of a typical farmed bird 50 years ago. They can go from egg to slaughter in just 35 days.

The selective breeding has helped ensure Britain has plentiful cheap chicken to furnish dinner tables across the country.

Yet campaigners, who include TV presenter and environmentalist Chris Packham, argue the breeding practice is unnatural and leads to severe health issues for the animals. What's more, they claim all this has been done purely for profit.

“A lot of these industries are not driven by simply feeding people and making a bit of a profit on top,” poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who is supporting the legal challenge, told the Independent outside the High Court this week. “It’s making maximum profit. And I can’t really think of another word but greed.”

It is a characterisation that chicken farmers would scoff at.

Far from greedy profiteering, many farmers say they are struggling to make ends meet. In fact, the industry is now warning of potential chicken shortages as soaring costs push many to give up altogether.

Shelley might have had a point about legislation - so much of it does come to pass on a surge in rhetoric - but not about economics.

Zephaniah and Packham have a point about the producer greed for profit, sure they do. Humans are naturally greedy, humans do like a profit and will do things in order to gain one. But then comes that free market part of the system, the competition. Producers find that profit eaten by the competition - it then ends up with the consumer gaining near all the benefit.

As, you know, shown by that recent Nobel Laureate, Bill Nordhaus. The entrepreneurs (and yes, let us indeed recall that this is where Anthony Fisher’s money came from) manage to, on average, retain some 3% of the value created - the rest being passed on to consumers as a result of that competition.

Human greed as tempered by free market capitalism leads to a chicken in every pot. Maybe that is even beastly to the birds who are the product. But in the interaction among humans beings it’s quite clearly the consumers who benefit from the whole arrangement.