opinion THE NEXT FIVE YEARS
On 19 December, following the General Election, the Queen addressed both Houses of Parliament as regards the government’s programme for the year to come.
Under the heading of ‘delivering Brexit and seizing the opportunities it brings’, the government put forward the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill and a number of other legislative proposals directly concerning the UK’s exit from the EU. These included the Agriculture Bill. In broad terms, the latter ‘will reform UK agriculture by improving environmental protections and strengthening transparency and fairness in the supply chain’. More specifically, the Bill seeks to ‘free farmers’ from what it describes as the ‘bureaucratic’ Common Agricultural Policy.
The Agriculture Bill will seek to replace the current subsidy system, which pays farmers based on the total amount of land farmed and, instead, ‘reward them for the work they do to enhance the environment, improve animal welfare and produce high quality food in a more sustainable way’. The Bill seeks to deliver on the Government’s election manifesto commitments to support farmers and land managers to ensure a smooth and phased transition away from the bureaucratic and flawed CAP to a system where farming efficiently and improving the environment go hand in hand. With regard to the latter, the Bill seeks to set out the framework for a new Environmental Land Management scheme, underpinned by the principle of ‘public money for public goods’.
There can be little objection to the proposal to replace the current Direct Payments scheme over a seven-year transition period. The scheme has given rise to all sorts of anomalous payments, including payments for apparent for lack of activity or activities that have little apparent relationship to farming. Equally, there can be little objection to introducing a new system where payments are made for the delivery of public goods, including environmental protection, improved access to the countryside, and measures to reduce flooding. Given recent controversy over the ratio of what farmers are paid and what retailers charge their customers, powers to improve transparency and fairness in the supply chain should also be welcomed. What is of concern, however, is the lack of specific proposals related to the business of the agricultural supply chain and, specifically, the livestock feed industry’s customers. It needs to be stated at the onset that, the agricultural supply industry has, self-evidently, a strongly vested interest in the outcome of what will eventually end up as the Agriculture Act. This applies in particular to the livestock feed industry, the supply industry’s largest single component. The UK’s exit from the EU provides
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the opportunity for a major review – or rethink – about what the UK wants from its farmers. As this column has remarked in past issues, future UK agriculture can locate on a spectrum ranging from minimal intervention to a fully rounded agricultural policy which seeks to produce the greatest possible proportion of UK food from UK farmers.
Even under the ‘bureaucratic’ Common Agricultural Policy, the proportion of British food produced by domestic producers is significantly less than 100 per cent. This is to be expected; there is a substantial proportion of the food consumed in the UK that cannot be produced in the British Isles under ‘normal’ UK conditions, of which climatic conditions constitute a significant obstacle. However, there are a significant number of foods that are produced in the UK and which, critics argue, could be imported from areas that possess a significant economic advantage over UK producers, either because of climatic conditions or because of the scale in which they operate or from a combination of economic and other factors. Why, argue the critics, should these countries not assume the role of suppliers to the UK of cereals or beef? In these contexts, North American grains or Argentine beef spring to mind and there are other commodities which, the critics argue, be advantageously be sourced from abroad, thus freeing up economic and other resources in the UK which could be put to comparatively advantageous use.
Again, in formulating its view of the future of agricultural policy in the UK, following its departure from the EU, any representations to government and other parties made by the agricultural supply trade needs to stress the economic advantages that a substantial agricultural infrastructure confers on the countryside. These include a significant volume of economic input, including a significant degree of employment and investment opportunities. At the most extreme end of the profile is the sort of economic desuetude that characterised parts of the UK’s rural environment during the 1930s, a high price to pay for supposed economic benefit.
There are a great many aspects of the way that agricultural policy has developed under the Common Agricultural Policy that are fundamentally unsound and the Agriculture Bill offers an opportunity to start the correction process aimed at developing an agricultural policy that is fully appropriate to the UK’s particular situation. What is and remains essential is a determination to get it right. In this, the various bodies that represent British agriculture and its suppliers, such as the NFU and AIC, have an important, indeed, critical role to play. There must be no mad dash for an easy solution to Britain’s agricultural future.
Comment section is sponsored by Compound Feed Engineering Ltd
www.cfegroup.com
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