Odds are against British food production

WELL at least a Lib Dem MP had the guts to come out and say it this week: British farmers are being screwed by the Government.

Not in so many words but that was the essence of Sarah Dyke’s message – and I cannot think of a single farmer who would disagree with her.

What they would disagree with, on the other hand, are the continuing assertions from industry leaders that things are going well and that the Government is really looking after British agriculture – the sort of parroting that can only be uttered by people hoping for some sort of official preferment once their term of office is over.

Wherever I look and whoever I listen to, on the contrary, the odds are continually being stacked up against British food production.

In Wales, for instance, farmers are coming under pressure to take 10 per cent of their land out of production to grow trees.

For those with heavily wooded sections, that will be easily achieved. On the other hand, effectively sterilising 20 acres on a 200-acre arable or beef farm is going to eat disastrously into profitability and in many cases turn the bottom line figure from a black one into a red one. But that doesn’t seem to matter to any politician.

Meanwhile ministers seem more fanatically driven than ever to support their mates in the construction industry by keeping up a healthy head of steam in the house-building sector, with hundreds of acres of good, productive land still being sacrificed every week to create new estates.

Farmers are also being encouraged to turn more land over to horticulture because it has finally dawned on some people that we are relying too much on imports of fruit and vegetables which we could grow here. Indeed we could.

But listen to anyone in the fruit and vegetable sector and they will tell you that trying to get a decent price out of a supermarket for what they grow is like trying to get fertiliser out of a rocking horse.

Supermarkets are more desperate than ever to do the Government’s bidding and keep food costs down which is why they will only offer unsustainably low prices to growers – and will even hold their hands out for a share of any efficiency savings that can be achieved in production.

And presiding over this process of killing British farming by a thousand cuts is the NFU.

I would like to see the grand plan for British agriculture which obviously lies behind this mess and which the Government believes is actually improving the fortunes of British farming. So let’s hear the details.

Let’s be told how we are going to raise the proportion of home-produced food from the current, appalling level of 50 per cent while at the same time covering some farmland with trees, more of it with houses and allowing even more of it to revert to wilderness.