Outlining the pressures facing farmers in UK and Europe

As farmers drove their tractors across London in order to stage a demonstration at Westminster last week, the media became much more interested. It was debated on politics shows and it made the main news. I was called by Radio Cymru (Radio Wales) who wanted to speak to me about the protest and whether I was involved. I had to disappoint them in that I was not involved but happy to talk and I outlined the three main reasons farmers across Europe are protesting.

The first is the pressure on prices whilst costs have gone through the roof, due to inflation caused largely by the war in Ukraine. The food chain, despite all denials have been as bad as they have ever been in dealing with farmers.

Low prices, one-sided contracts, ridiculously tight specification and so on is the world we live in. If you are a fruit and vegetable grower it has been a terrible time and quite frankly many have had enough and are packing up.

The second reason is government policy and the obsession with the environment, biodiversity, and net zero. These are important of course, but so is having some food to eat!

The way farmers are being enticed to put land into environmental schemes hurts, as most farmers (rightly or wrongly) want to produce food and they consider that as their noble task (feeding the nation).

Defra have now changed the rules again last week in order to restrict individual farms to no more than 25% of their land being put into enviro schemes.

They claim these actions involve taking land out of production for a short time, but a number of farmers have put in for 80% of their land into these actions, very much as predicted in this column over the last few weeks.

Just to make this a whole lot worse, farmers see government hand in hand with environmentalists ignoring the sequestration of carbon on our grassland farms, but quite happy to ignore any carbon that should by right be attached to imports.

On that subject, as we are asked to produce our safe food (not everyone has that) to higher and higher standards, we see trade deals being made where we will allow in more and more food produced to different standards.

What farmers are saying is, you cannot have one rule for us and another for imports.

The third reason is the weather, and we have all had dreadful weather this year and it is going to affect crops which are already yellow in many cases which will badly affect yield, with many in need of re-drilling.

The winter has been long for livestock too and the costs of buying in extra fodder and straw has been considerable for many. There will be less food produced this year I expect due to this terrible weather, and we wait and see if it is replaced by cheaper imports.

I made it clear to the folk at Radio Cymru that things are not nearly as bad in England as they are in Wales when it comes to government policy and many of our policies have changed substantially in the last 6 months to a more sensible offer whereas their policies have not moved as yet.

I also told them that for the first time that I can remember, Welsh farmers look enviously at what is taking place in England: not popular but its true.

Change is what we are facing across Europe and the pressures are great, with each government looking to strike the balance between food security, providing food at low prices and striking deals which do not undermine their own farmers.

Some do environment policies better than others; some are extreme and others struggle to get that balance right. The Netherlands and Wales have gone all out for environment but from totally different positions.

The Netherlands have decided that they will produce two thirds less food (the two thirds they export) producing food for their own citizens only. This is all part of drastically reducing Nitrogen fertilizer use and therefore emissions and to be fair the Netherlands is a powerhouse of agricultural production with high stocking rates and dense animal population.

Angered by low prices, rising costs, cheap imports and the new regulations farmers blocked roads and set fires to disrupt traffic last month.

The Dutch government have proposals to buy up to 3,000 farms in order to take them out of production; the worst polluters they say.

In France there have been many protests due to the government’s 27 nation bloc’s environmental policies, such as the Green Deal. This calls for limits on the use of chemicals and make inputs more expensive due to regulation and red tape.

Again, the main grievance is against the low prices they are paid and the new EU Mercosur free trade agreement with South America. It’s the same in Belgium and in fact 27 EU countries have experienced farmer protests.

Many of those are small farmers, disillusioned at EU agricultural policy, together with the purchasing power of supermarkets and food companies.

Farmers around the world are in fact protesting, demanding relief from what they say is a crisis driven by climate change policies, red tape, and low prices.

They are all fed up spending their lives working incessantly without ever getting a decent income as production costs have risen steadily in recent years, whilst prices paid to farmers have stagnated or fallen.

Many farmers have been trying various strategies to work their way into a better place, buying or renting more land, investing in machinery, taken on a lot of debt, and seen their workload increased significantly.

Increasing production to combat lower prices is a strategy with a risk attached to it and all the extra stress and worry that entails.

Many converted to organic and have since seen those markets collapse post covid as the cost-of-living crisis hit everyone.

Organic markets are notorious for riding up and down with economic well-being for obvious reasons.

Since the 1980’s all the various regulations which ensured fair prices in Europe have been dismantled, as governments put their faith in free trade agreements, pitching all farmers in the world against one another, encouraging them to produce at the lowest possible price, sacrificing their own income and increased their debt.

The added problem of environment policy has provided the tin hat as it were, the ecological impact of modern food production systems is the unavoidable issue. Climate change pressure groups are far too powerful and talk of planting trees and restricting production whilst the poorest in society would suffer the most.

Producing ecologically has huge benefits, however it costs farmers more and in order to reach that agroecological transition, agricultural markets need to be protected and not stifled whilst imports come in with no account for their production footprint.

Whilst single issue groups ponder this as they worry about the environment, I can tell you that expecting us to deliver agroecological transition whilst producing for the lowest possible price simply will not work.