Tesco UK announced this week an “enhanced and accelerated” plan to increase support payments to pig farmers by a further £6.6m (€7.8m) until August. This will bring total support to £10m (€11.8m) between March and August.

The company has also switched five additional lines to British pigmeat over recent weeks, meaning that its British pork products have increased by 30% compared with last year.

Since January, Tesco says that it has taken an additional 32,000 British pigs and plans to increase this by a further 22,000 over coming months.

The UK is a major importer of pigmeat and figures from the English levy board AHDB show that 224,000t were imported in the first quarter of 2022, a 20% increase on the same period last year.

In the same period the UK exported 62,300t of pigmeat, a 15% increase on the same period last year, as well as 34,200t of offal.