Self-sufficiency will be key to our survival

I OFTEN while away what little free time I have at the weekend by taking a look at the world of farming as viewed by Countryfile, a programme not really about farming at all but designed to portray a farming fantasy land as some kind of entertainment for the non-farming section of the population. And that’s most of them.

But who should suddenly loom into focus the other evening, striding manfully across his Somerset acres than our old friend Neil Parish, Conservative MP for Tiverton, sometime chairman of the EU agriculture committee and who now chairs the Efra committee.

Who proceeded to preach to us on the way forward for British farming: a discourse he was evidently wellqualified to deliver given what the audience was presented with by way of an impeccable-looking set of credentials.

For here was someone who had started out as a ‘mere’ farmer but had climbed the greasy pole of politics to achieve international office. Surely, then, a man who could talk from experience.

Well up to a point. Because what should be factored in here is the information that Neil is not actually talking from the point of view of a hand-to-mouth farmer living from month to month on a slender income. He may be farming practically but he is doing it with the cushion of an MP’s salary and expenses plus his retirement gratuity as an MEP. Which puts him in a totally different class.

Anyway with Neil’s broad experience across all farming issues his words would surely be worth listening to, I argued. How wrong I was. For Neil’s remedy for repelling the threatened deluge of cheap food from Australia, the US and elsewhere rests on upping the quality of what comes off British farms, of doing everything to the highest standards of production and assurance.

Which could only be suggested by someone who is woefully out of touch with the current realities in British agriculture and who, to borrow a familiar phrase, needs to get out more. Raising farming standards beyond their current level (where they are already among the highest in the world) is merely going to entail more costs for producers. Costs which they will have a devil of a job to get the retailers to cover and which will actually act against their best interests. Because on the shelf home-produced food will then become even more expensive than imports and there can only be one result in a market where the vast majority of food purchases are still made on the basis of price rather than quality of provenance – and it doesn’t take a genius to work out what it will be.

But while mulling over Neil’s hopelessly flawed argument I received an alert from the TFA about a forthcoming webinar where the virtual attendees will be regaled with sparking nuggets of farming wisdom from none other than Christine Tacon, the first Groceries Code Adjudicator, whose achievement in office could be summarised on an ear tag with room left over for the 23rd psalm.

Her mission to ensure fairer dealing between suppliers and retailers was launched at a time when British agriculture was in the mire up to its ankles and was so successful that by the time she collected her pay-off it was knee-deep.

Yet those of us toiling away at the coal face are expected to look up to and learn from people like these who are constantly paraded as ‘experts’ when their actual expertise is rather less than their reputation would suggest.

The same class of ‘experts’ as those who are now running the AHDB and assuring us the way forward is to export more of what we produce, rather than suggesting it might not be a bad idea to start lifting our own self-sufficiency in food above the current shocking – and frankly perilous – level of 60%, our reliance on imported fresh vegetables alone having increased by 16% in the last two decades.

Yet those of us toiling away at the coal face are expected to look up to people like these who are constantly paraded as ‘experts’