Food production central to policy argues Ewing
A promise to see food production lie at the heart of future farm support measures in Scotland met with industry approval at NFU Scotland’s annual general meeting yesterday.
Addressing the union’s annual conference, rural economy secretary Fergus Ewing said that the debate on post-brexit farm policy had been sadly lacking in any mention of the primary role of agriculture – producing food.
“It’s not the only role. But it’s the central and fundamental role. What farming was invented for,” the minister told the 300 delegates at the event in Glasgow.
He said that while much of the emphasis had been placed on the delivery of public goods – this had generally been interpreted as environmental issues – but he stressed that ensuring the country’s capacity to produce food was very much in the public interest.
However he told the meeting that his department’s ability to draw up plans for future policy was being hampered by the lack of clarity from the UK government over the level of the farm budget which would be delivered to Scotland after Brexit.
Pressed on the issue, however, he indicated that he hoped the proposals and approaches being reviewed and explored by the working groups such as the farm champions would be drawn together and used for modelling exercises “over the course of the year” and would outline the broad direction of travel of any new policy:
“But it’s important to spend some time getting the right policies rather than rushing something through,” said the cabinet secretary.
He said that while many groups felt that the answer was fairly straightforward, it was crucial to get buy in from all sectors of the industry – but given the short period of time before the proposed exit from Europe, he said that any transition period should extend well beyond the sofar promised period of two years.
And while he might have described Brexit as the “elephant in the room”, this wasn’t the only animal which was up for discussion during his speech – and his “over my dead body” comment on the reintroduction of Lynx into the Scottish countryside was soon trending on Twitter.
However, while he gave a similar commitment on wolf, beaver “and goodness knows what else” – claiming that rather than re-wilding he favoured repopulating the Scottish countryside with humans – the lack of any mention of beaver drew stern comment from the floor.
“Make no mistake,” said the union’s potato committee chairman, Peter Grewar, “these creatures are creating serious ramifications for the rural economy – and land managers are being left to pick up the cost of the illegal release of beavers by others.”