Western Daily Press (Saturday)
The French show how to stand up for farmers
Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger tells Environment Secretary Steve Barclay he has every admiration for the way continental farmers are reacting to a crisis in agriculture
DEAR Steve, Had you been travelling virtually anywhere on the continent these last couple of weeks you might well have found your progress impeded by groups of very determined and very embittered farmers.
Not merely, I might point out, in France, where the farming community has elevated the whole business of protesting to a real art form. No: the discontent has equally seen ructions in Belgium, Germany, Italy and Holland.
All, more or less – though with a few local variations – directed at farming policies which are making it more and more difficult for producers to make anything like a decent living, no matter how many hours a week they labour.
Their main target is, as one might expect, the European Commission which, from its location on the moral high ground, is doing its best to green up its farming act. Trouble is when you start telling people to let land lie fallow, to (commendably, of course) stop using so many pesticides and herbicides and at the same time surround environmental payments with so much red tape you require a machete to get through it, frustrations tend to mount, tempers fray and before you know where you are the French are rolling silage bales into McDonalds and re-rendering the town hall with a generous application of pig slurry in a tasteful shade of… well, I needn’t go on.
Plus there is general ire directed at the supermarkets for screwing everyone down on prices with ruinous consequences for the farming community.
The real point is that restricting the output from farms within the EU is to a certain extent counter-productive because it means that more has to be imported from elsewhere to keep the nations fed. Which – as the French farmers have pointed out – is a bit ridiculous when their schoolchildren are being served foodstuffs their parents are no longer allowed to produce.
One can sympathise entirely with this degree of reaction – particularly when it is directed against a system which offers farmers ostensibly generous environmental grants as an alternative to income from food production but then metaphorically puts them at the top of a greasy pole festooned with barbed wire and sited in the centre of a crocodile-infested swamp.
And our farmers? Well, they are equally peeved, though given the NFU’s historic, utter abhorrence of anything so unseemly as a public demonstration there is little point in anyone standing on the doorstep ready to cheer them on as they march down the street.
There is, of course, a common grievance: the gradual reduction in food self-sufficiency, a matter which I have repeatedly raised with your predecessors. But there is a difference, equally.
On the continent the gripes are all about tariff-free and thus cheap imports from Ukraine and the belief that the Spanish are shovelling in quantities of cheap fruit and veg illicitly produced using ostensibly banned pesticides and herbicides.
That, at least, has spurred the Macron administration into action. In addition to handing out a 200 million euro package of support to French farmers, it has announced a ban on all imports of foodstuffs produced with the use of agro-chemicals which are officially banned within the EU.
That, to coin a phrase, is the way to do it. That is how a government should stand up for its farmers. That is how to employ practical methods to alleviate hardship in the farming industry.
Here, on the other hand, we have a Government which has been assiduously sewing up some very dodgy deals with the Americans and the antipodeans to bring in cheap meat to keep the shoppers happy and supermarket profits buoyant.
Could there, in all honesty, be a greater contrast?