Climate crisis farming boost, says Eustice

CLIMATE change could provide a boost for British food, the Environment Secretary told farmers, as he sought to give reassurances over growing pressures on the industry.

“Climate change is going to mean that water scarcity becomes an issue in parts of the world. And parts of the world that have good and the most versatile agricultural land today may find it harder to produce crops in future,” George Eustice told the National Farmers Union conference at the Internationa Convention Centre in Birmingham yesterday. So “the temperate regions of the world, including here in the UK, will find that there is strong demand for the produce that they grow”.

The minister was challenged over the support given to the industry in the wake of Brexit and the Covid pandemic. Minette Batters, the NFU president, said a crisis that led to 40,000 pigs being culled because of a lack of butchers after an exodus of eastern European workers was down to a “total lack of understanding of how food production works” within government.

Ms Batters said the Government was focused on reintroducing species and re-wilding rather than food security when world events threatened supply.

“There is a cost-of-living crisis looming and an increasingly unstable world ... the UK Government’s energy … for our countryside seems to be almost entirely focused on anything other than domestic food production,” she said.

Challenged on trade deals with Australia and New Zealand that the NFU has said risk British producers being undercut, Mr Eustice said that the deals could be renegotiated after 10 years, and the Government would do this “if … your expectations of the trade deal were lower than you’d hoped”.