We are sacrificing food security – and farmers

We cannot live for long without food. We survive better with good quality, locally grown food, making knowledgeable and good choices about what we eat. The UK government has recently been presented with the Dimbleby report which advocates just that. Johnston and his team say they wish to create a highskilled, high-income country post-brexit. British primary producers have employed foreign labour to produce high-quality, local food. Abattoirs employ foreign labour; packers also employ foreign labour; simply because they cannot attract British people to do these skilled, often uncomfortable jobs. All these foreign workers must be paid the same rates as British people (they are paid at least the minimum wage) and although they can reclaim tax when they leave this country, they all pay national insurance.

The UK government insists that there is no crisis, that there will be plenty of food. There will be, but it will be foreign, produced to lower safety, hygiene and animal welfare standards than here in UK. Brits will still eat, but it will be foreign food – we will be at the mercy of other countries, with no food security of our own.

For some time, UK governments (of all colours) have been edging towards cheap, imported food. British farmers simply cannot compete on a level playing field with other countries which do not have the same ideals of safety and welfare. British food is inevitably going to be more expensive – a niche product.

The result will be fewer farmers, virtually no livestock and less carbon sequestered in our productive grass-fed livestock farms (we do not produce beef or lamb in vast stockyards like the US and Australia). British farming will no longer have a place in society and the countryside will become a different place, bereft of cattle and sheep, pigs and hens, grazing in neat fields, with crops grown only for fuel. This wound not be the countryside I have loved all my life.

GILL LAWRIE Arbroath, Angus