Terms Of Trade

Chicken Ship

The future of the Dorset economy was said to be in severe jeopardy this morning as news emerged of an escalating tit-for-tat trade war between by the wholly Threadbone Corporation-owned supermarket chain Threadboneextra and the Association of Dorset Chicken Farmers. ADCF [Non]-Acting President and regular spokesperson  Aggan Fische said that members had no choice other than to raise prices by 33,000% after the giant supermarket leviathan had imposed a 0.2p “handling” surcharge on all dead poultry (plucked or un-plucked)* entering its warehouse facilities. Threadboneextra bulk buying amounts to some 99.99% of the total Dorset dead bird market - a distortion farmers' co-operatives have been keen to correct. 

* An unnecessary clarification since, according to trade experts, everyone involved has been well and truly plucked [Ed]

Commodities exchange Arab[le] agro-economist Kondratief Wayve said the standoff was regrettable and that it made no sense for the two parties to wage war by fighting so aggressively in the normally self-adjusting - supply/demand-regulated - raw meat, wet fish and assorted poultry market which has long been subject to regular cyclical perturbation. But, Donal E Ructation - bullish procurer-in-chief for Threadboneextra Meat-Counter Wholesaling - said it was the intransigence of the poultry breeders and their refusal to align their prices to the European Union's caged-birds price-fixing index [itself pegged to the petro-rouble] that was at the root of the problem. 

Asked whether there was a post Drexit opportunity to be seized, Dorset Broadcasting’s Agricultural Affairs Correspondent Lorna Kuntsbigger was unequivocal: “Absolutely f*****g not”, she said, adding “nothing else has been up to now; so why should this be any different". "This will be a hot topic on my popular Sunday Morning with Lorna Kuntsbigger, where I will demonstrate my fordable interviewing prowess by asking ministers the same question many times and with increasing insistence in the hope that they fail to answer it and I don't have to think of another... if one of your viewers can think of a question I guarantee to ask it".