Tensions in Black Sea region have potential to affect food prices

It is so mild and dry as we start February and only a month to go until spring as the first extra daylight hour has been won and we will gain hour after hour every three weeks or so from now on. A slight frost in the morning is a small price to pay for sunny days and dry weather; long may it last.

While the media still fuss over parties at No 10 and do their best to undermine government, which they arrogantly believe is their right, the political tensions in the Black Sea region has the potential to affect food prices in a major way. Wheat markets have eased a little since December as global supply and forecasts for future crops have improved.

Given that both Russia and the Ukraine are two of the world’s major exporters of wheat (29 per cent of global trade between them), things could radically change. Exports have not been impacted as yet, but global wheat supplies are tight and any disruption could have serious impacts. With such high oil prices, levy body AHDB comments that biofuels made from wheat or maize is now far more attractive which will increase demand.

While farm prices are high, costs are having an effect as margins suffer on many farms. Our national output from dairy farms 12 months to the end of March this year is expected to be down. At such high input costs there is no incentive to push for extra output. Many of the high-yielding farms are switching from three times milking to twice a day as the labour shortage bites and we are yet to see what effect the huge rise in fertiliser prices will have. I suspect that many farms will have bought a good percentage of their needs forward, but many have not.

I was chatting to a calf rearer the other day who said an articulated lorry of milk powder is now £68,000; up from £45,000 last year. His fertiliser was £7,000 an artic load last year but this year it will be £22,000; unprecedented increases which are going to have an effect. Hopefully they will be short lived but no one knows. Companies are profiteering by 20p a litre on fuel according to the RAC and maybe some severe tax on that excess would be well placed?

Industry leaders are highlighting the fact that allocated budgets under Defra’s Environment Land Management (ELM) scheme are going to benefit wealthy landowners and not ordinary family farms and tenants. The farming sector had urged ministers to allocate 65 per cent of the funding to the first component of ELM, the Sustainable Farming Incentive, 30 per cent to the second, Local Nature Recovery and five per cent to the third, Landscape Recovery.

This split would direct funding towards farming businesses given that Landscape Recovery is only accessible to large land owners. Government has opted to split the budget equally between the three schemes, diverting a huge amount of money away from ordinary farmers. The irony here is that having slammed the Common Agricultural Payments, government stated that the failure of these payments which paid farmers according to the numbers of acres they farmed would be gone.

Thirty per cent of the budget will now be spent on just three per cent of the land, but of course it delivers what environmentalists want. It is now very clear that the aim is to ‘support’ changes across the entire farmed landscape in order to deliver government/ environmentalists ambitions. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has now joined the Public Accounts Committee in criticising government’s approach and the failure to properly support nature-based solutions designed to improve biodiversity, flood alleviation, better livelihoods for local communities and emission reduction.

NFU President Minette Batters has also criticised government, which seems to consider competent, technical policy to be boring, preferring emotionally engaging policies which are absolutely useless in a practical sense. Unless the Prime Minister can bring this government together and deliver an overarching strategy for farming, it is going to be really tough, she said.

A good example is bovine TB where two seven-year badger-culling pilots have reduced new confirmed bTB incidents by 64 per cent and a 74 per cent reduction in skin test reactor cattle, compared to the four-year period before the culls started. Boris Johnson unlike his predecessors has entered the fray, stepping back from science and evidence-based policy. Culling, a vital tool, is now off the table and farmers should be under no illusion of how difficult the future will be. The pig industry is pointing out that African swine fever has taken a massive leap of 900km from Germany to northern Italy due to careless meat use and hunters moving wild boars for sport. This highly contagious and devastating disease is on the march and the National Pig Association points out that while everything leaving this country is destined for the EU is subject to border controls, there are no controls on anything coming into the UK; an alarming state of affairs.

There is a huge row going on in Wales as a multimillion pound private equity fund is trying to buy more land to plant with trees. London-based Foresight Group has found itself facing huge local opposition after purchasing its fourth farm in a growing portfolio. Local people are concerned that Foresight’s commitment to planting non-native trees in order to offset carbon emissions will harm the local community.

Plans to plant trees on farmland in the historic Cwrt y Cadno valley has been met with outrage and Welsh government is now under pressure to protect rural areas in the forthcoming Agricultural Bill. The Tenant Farmers’ Association’s George Dunn commented that the focus is on offsetting future carbon emissions by planting thousands of trees rather than making real efforts to decarbonise the economy.

The farming industry has welcomed a decision by the advertising watchdog to ban a series of adverts by Swedish drink makers Oatly which has been making misleading claims about our dairy and meat industry. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has received numerous complaints about the TV, newspaper and social media adverts from the public and it found that four out of five Oatly claims are misleading.

Adverts such as ‘climate change experts say cutting dairy and meat products from our diets is the single biggest lifestyle change we can make to reduce our environmental impact’, was found by the ASA to mislead consumers in that they would understand this to be a definitive, objective claim that was based on scientific consensus. The reality is that Oatly had presented the opinion of one climate expert and omitted the word ‘probably’ from his quote.

Social media adverts which claimed that dairy and meat farming emit more carbon dioxide equivalent than all the world’s planes, trains, cars, ships etc. combined were also unsurprisingly ruled as misleading. TV adverts where children questioned their father’s decision to drink cow’s milk, claiming that

Oatly generates 73 per cent less CO2e versus cow’s milk, were also criticised. Why can’t Oatly and other manufacturers sell their products which cost far more than real milk on their own merits? Is it because they fear that most people do not want to eat or drink heavily processed fake food any more than they want re-wilding?