Western Daily Press (Saturday)
All talk and no action to support our industry
The race is on in the farming world to catch up on time lost to the bad weather – but that won’t prevent shortages later in the year, Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger warns Defra Secretary Steve Barclay
DEAR Steve, I hate saying ‘I told you so’ – but I told you so. I’m afraid my predictions a few weeks back about the long-term impact of the appallingly wet weather are now being echoed by all kinds of farming organisations, together with a warning that cereal-based foods are going to increase in price later in the year as shortages bite.
That means the cost of bread, cakes, biscuits and beer is inevitably going to rise, putting further pressure on the consumer’s pocket. I suppose one could argue that the situation will act as a very useful reinforcement of the message that climate change can no longer be ignored or dismissed as a phenomenon which may well affect other parts of the globe but not the UK. But I don’t exactly see that helping to soften the blow.
I see the AHDB is airily assuring us that everything will be OK because we shall just import more to make up the shortfall. I just wonder where it plans to import from because wherever I cast my eyes, I see similar threats to the 2024 harvest.
Of course, the real irony is that we shall be forced to accept whatever imports are offered us, no matter how they have been produced or processed and in all likelihood originating on farms which are strangers to the rigorously applied production standards which contribute so much to the cost of producing food here.
Precisely the situation, of course, which has led to so much opposition from within the farming community to those cheap meat imports from the Antipodes and the States which the Government has foolishly and needlessly done deals to accept.
I read of Bradshaw, the new bloke at the top of the NFU, having a poke at the Government over its muchproclaimed ‘support’ for British farmers and accusing it of being better at delivering words than actual help. I have to agree, sadly.
How can any government claim to be helping farmers when it has effectively handed control of the market to the big retailers, who continue to make unreasonable demands, set unfavourable conditions and pay inadequate prices while racking up billions in profits?
A great many fine words have, indeed, been bandied about but most of the farmers I speak to are doing considerably worse than they were last year and still see what passes for government support as being too little and too inaccessible.
Meanwhile we have the spectacle of Natural England bidding to start dictating the way farming is conducted on the Somerset Levels. It is, let me remind you, an agency whose former boss went on record as being in favour of demolishing the pumping stations which keep the entire area not merely farmable but habitable.
Its proposal now is to banish all livestock farming, raise the water table and introduce paludiculture so farmers can grow lettuce, watercress, celery and other low-value crops instead. Of course there is no certainty that the plan will work. There will need to be trials. And so far I have read nothing to inform me what will happen if these don’t work.
All, apparently, in the interests of shedding historic loads of soil phosphorus which are damaging some of the protected wildlife sites down there.
What is not mentioned, of course, is that permanent pasture plays a very important role in sequestering carbon and helping to mitigate climate change whereas if you plough it up the carbon is oxidised and immediately released to the atmosphere.
Other than that, if you actively raise the water tables on the Levels you don’t merely affect farming, you alter the entire hydrological balance of the area and – particularly with the more violent weather coming down the road – vastly increase the risk that farms, business and homes will be more frequently and devastatingly flooded.
Is that really what you want to see? Yours ever,
Ian