the Single Farm Payment in 2015. What some may see as an unwelcome hint was recently reported,


via Farmers’ Weekly, in the shape of comments by Neil Parish, Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee and MP for Tiverton and Honiton in Devon. He recently visited Northern Ireland to get a sense of how agriculture in this part of the world was shaping up to the Brexit challenge. But before leaving he made it very clear, according to Belfast-


based Farming Life that the UK taxpayer ‘will have to be convinced of agriculture’s real worth to the country as whole, before any deal on a future support arrangement for farming can be implemented’. The writer went on to say that all of this was ‘code for something quite sinister in nature, that Whitehall had already decided to cut the direct support budget enjoyed by agriculture under the current EU arrangements quite significantly. And, if this does happen, the consequences for local beef and sheep farmers will be dramatic’. Given what we already know about the profitability of lowland and less favoured area grazing farms – see elsewhere in this issue of Feed Compounder – it is not difficult to concur with this statement. Farmers’ Weekly put a slightly different take on the visit, reporting


only that, according to Parish, UK farmers would ‘have a fight on their hands to retain the current level of agricultural support post-Brexit’. He said that subsidies might be retained at current levels initially but were then likely to be reduced. He thought it likely that, post-Brexit, it would be a ‘rear-guard action’ as far as the Treasury was concerned. Mr Parish, who was speaking at a Westminster Food and Nutrition


Forum meeting in London, said that he believed there would be what he described as ‘a reasonable amount’ of financial support for farmers at first but direct payments would be ‘very hard to defend’ by 2025-30, going on to warn that the Treasury would ‘want to wean productive farmers off direct support’. He said that there was what he described as ‘a growing consensus’ that farmers will have to do more in return for financial support from the public purse after Brexit. Another speaker at the forum, ADAS consultant John Elliott,


outlined two possible scenarios for agricultural support post-Brexit. Both scenarios involved the abolition of direct payments, and Eliot suggested that ‘getting rid of direct payments was a matter of when,


Editor’s Notebook is sponsored by Compound Feed Engineering Ltd


rather than if’. He said that future support for agriculture was likely to focus on rewarding farmers for delivering public goods, such as looking after the environment. He noted that the Treasury had pledged to maintain support payments to farmers at current levels until 2020, but it has made no promises for the years afterwards. Saying that the UK government has agreed to honour the final basic payments due to farmers under current CAP agreement with Brussels, he noted that these payments, which will cover the year 2019, were due to be paid to farmers from 1 December 2019 to 30 June 2020, adding that the government had said that it would honour those payments ‘even if the UK leaves the EU before that date’. The further question that arises is what rules will be relevant to the UK’s agricultural sector once Brexit becomes a fact. The Government’s White Paper, outlining its post-Brexit strategy,


revealed that European rules on agriculture will be replicated by the UK government post-Brexit until ministers decide whether or not they should be retained. The government said that a UK-wide policy framework for agriculture would be introduced to replicate the framework provided by the CAP. At the moment, devolved administrations in each UK nation are responsible for implementing the CAP framework in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This was all laid down in the government’s White Paper on Brexit but is still likely to highlight complaints from the devolved administrations that their own particular concerns are being shunted aside in the negotiations leading up to Brexit. These concerns are already being voice by Wales and Scotland and are almost certain to emerge in their most problematic form when it comes to the future of the border between the Republic of Ireland and the Six Counties.


ECONOMIC ROUND-UP Official figures published on Friday 28th


April showed that Britain’s


economy ‘cooled considerably’ in the first three months of the year as higher inflation squeezed disposable incomes. As is widely recognised, the economy appears to have shaken


off the immediate and unexpected shock of the Brexit vote last June and has been surprisingly resilient, with growth rates of a revised 0.5 per cent in the third quarter of 2016 and 0.7 per cent in the last three months of the year. But in a turnaround mainly due to slower growth in the dominant


services sector, the Preliminary Estimate of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product in the first quarter of 2017 was 0.3 per cent, the weakest performance since the first quarter of 2016, when the economy grew by just 0.2 per cent. The negative effects of sterling’s depreciation since the EU


www.cfegroup.com PAGE 18 MAY/JUNE 2017 FEED COMPOUNDER


referendum appear to be outweighing the positive effects, the ensuing boost to exports with the weaker pound raising the cost of imported materials, including fuels and pushing inflation to a three-year high of 2.3 per cent. The result was that wages adjusted for inflation fell in February for the first time in two and a half years, even though unemployment continued to drop and vacancies were at a record low.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68