Date: 29/10/2007    

A quarter of a million healthy lambs are to be incinerated or turned into biofuel because of fears over the market price for lamb meat and rises in the price of animal feed, the Guardian has reported.

The Welsh government has offered farmers £15 per animal in order to slaughter 250,000 hill lambs to conserve feed for breeding ewes. Foot and mouth movement restrictions have meant that lambs have been trapped in certain pastures, leading to overgrazing and threatening next year's stock.

The meat from the lambs involved is known as 'light lamb' - popular in Europe but not in Britain, where there is no established market. But hopes of selling the meat for food were scuppered early on by pressure from the meat industry, which argued that such a sudden influx would cause the price for lamb to collapse. Lambs already only fetch between 60 and 70 pence per kilo at auction.

Farmers said it was not practical to feed the lambs up for slaughter next year, as the price of animal feed has nearly doubled in the last year, largely as a result of poor harvests and competition with bio-energy crop growth.

Peter Stevenson, chief policy adviser from Compassion in World Farming, said that a market should have been found for the animals' meat.