Western Daily Press (Saturday)
When will country realise food isn’t cheap?
Farmers are ready to step up to the plate and step up the output of home-produced food, Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Environment Secretary Steve Barclay. Trouble is, noone in government appears interested in encouraging them
DEAR Steve I went to the launch of the NFU’s manifesto this week and I have to say I was, for once, impressed by what I heard. There was, indeed, little I could disagree with when it came to matters such as maximising our potential for producing food to reducing our dangerous reliance on imports – particularly, of course, imports of products we can quite easily grow ourselves.
To which I could add the qualifying statement “as long as the price is right” – though I will come to that in a minute.
I have long questioned the need for us to import cabbages from Spain, spring onions from Kenya and potatoes from Egypt – a practice which it appears to me is a left-over from our days of Empire when we looked to the Commonwealth countries and our other friends overseas to fulfil our food needs. And look what happened when the sea suddenly became infested with U-boats in 1939.
We are, I would argue, in equally perilous waters today, hoping that nearly 50 per cent of our food will be delivered on time in a world where the four horsemen appear to have arrived, bringing some of their unsavoury friends, such as Drought.
What has driven us to this state is largely the activity of the supermarkets who still peddle the lie to millions of gullible consumers that food is cheap.
Quite frankly I have been appalled by some of the Christmas ‘offers’ I have seen around giving families the chance to enjoy a festive feast for less than the price of a packet of fags.
Such deals come with a hidden price, mostly a price paid by the farmer who is beaten down to a miserable level of return that makes his entire business unsustainable – with the inevitable result.
I know times are tough for many families and I know the cost-of-living increases are biting hard but they are biting even harder on farmers.
We have to get the message across that unless we introduce fairer pricing mechanisms (as some other countries have done) then our reliance on imports is going to soar to a level where a single international upheaval could empty our shelves within days. The matter of food selfsufficiency and thus security has never been quite so important as it is today – and this, by the way, is the message being shouted loud by farmers in Europe who have, inexplicably, been ordered by Brussels to let four per cent of their land lie fallow.
Quite honestly no-one in this Government seems to be taking the same long view of our food production systems other than to hold out the spectacle of rewilding as being the ultimate goal to aim for.
Madness. We have some of the best and most productive farmland in the world and some of the planet’s most adept and experienced producers. In that respect we are better placed than many countries to rack up food production, reduce our reliance on imports and, importantly, deliver the public safe, wholesome food with a guaranteed provenance.
It grieves me more than somewhat when I read in my own constituency of another 230 houses about to be built on prime, tenanted agricultural land. One way and another we are seeing hundreds and hundreds of hectares of productive farmland covered in bricks, mortar and Tarmac rather than restricting new development to brownfield sites - where, of course, it costs more.
We cannot afford to let this situation continue. We have the means and the expertise to crank up our food production but at the moment Government policies appear to constitute an immoveable barrier to this happening.
Yours ever, Ian