A Defra minister has admitted that Christmas dinner could be affected as millions of turkeys and other birds are culled amid a devastating avian flu outbreak.
Lord Benyon told the House of Lords that he could not guarantee the traditional turkey lunch would not be affected by the epidemic, but insisted there is no need to panic buy. He sought to reassure the public that the UK has a "resilient supply chain" that can cope with such an outbreak.
The international environment minister said: "We are seeing increasing number of turkeys falling prey to this disease, but at the moment, the situation for Christmas turkeys is there or thereabouts OK. But I wouldn't like to predict, if it carried on at the current rate, there wouldn't be some impact."
