Lewis Bollard

I think that that voice is being hugely neglected in the debate.

The other thing I'll say on the money the pork industry has is, yes, it's a commodity business, but it's also an oligopoly.

And so you've got a very small number of firms that process the vast majority of pigs, and they do seem to make outsized profits.

So they don't make the kind of profits you would expect.

And across these industries, we constantly see price-fixing scandals and other antitrust scandals because it's a very small number of companies, and it only requires minimal coordination for them to make greater profits than you would think they could.

I mean, this is the absurdity of this, is that the egg industry has been saying, we can't possibly afford this transition to cage-free eggs.

They, over the last few years of high egg prices, they've made insane profits.

How much?

Well, so like Kelmain, which is the biggest egg producer, I think its share price has doubled over the last few years.

And it's because the price elasticity for eggs, it's very inelastic.

So you can just keep cranking up the price on even a very small reduction in supply, and you can then take all that surplus.

And so they've been doing that.

And as a result, you see a whole lot of these industries, they are actually flush with cash.

The problem is,

Depends on the company, right?

So a lot of the egg producers are actually relatively small.

It's the Tyson Foods and things that are on the billions.

But no, they have the money to do these reforms.

I mean, that is not the constraint.

The constraint is the willingness to do the reforms.