Speaking up for UK farmers
AMID the shroud-waving and general blather about our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions before we all drown it’s refreshing, occasionally, to hear the still, small voice of reason.
Belonging in this instance to Lord Deben, who chairs the Climate Change Committee, and who in a previous existence was Tory agriculture minister John ‘Burger King’ Gummer.
In an interview with a farming journal he has put forward the highly valid point that it would be unfair to impose onerous controls on British farmers in the interests of reducing greenhouse gas emissions if we then go and import food which is cheaper partly because it comes from countries with a rather more insouciant attitude towards climate change and environmental damage.
“Farmers are going to be asked to do a lot of things, and they cannot do that if they are trying to compete with people who don’t do that. The issue of imports becomes really important,” he was quoted as saying.
Well said, your Lordship. Because the two great, fundamental points that this Government is in danger of discounting completely as it sets ambitious new targets for a greener United Kingdom are: (a) we are all in this together and thus (b) any contribution the UK makes towards mitigating the effects of climate change will not only represent a pinprick on the global scale but will be pretty well meaningless if economies such as China and Australia cling to coalbased energy production and carry on burning an Albert Hall full of the stuff every minute.
But then we have an odd history of trying to punch above our weight by heading for the moral high ground, if you’ll excuse the mix of metaphors. There was the famous occasion when Labour thought it could collect some brownie points by abandoning battery egg production before everyone else, thus shaming our trading partners into following suit.
It didn’t happen: some of our more opportunistic trading partners simply bought up all the redundant units, got them up and running and flooded the UK with the cheap eggs its poultry farmers were no longer permitted to produce, forcing a number of them out of business.
But there is another dimension to the profound observations of the noble lord and that concerns the shorter-term problem of food imports, more particularly the Damoclean threat of huge consignments of hormone-rich beef and Domestos-flavoured chicken from that great polluter the USA.
(A country, let us remind ourselves, led until recently by a man who declared climate change to be a hoax, where vast sections of the population still believe that to be a fact and which has become so reliant on the internal combustion engine that revolution threatens whenever restricting the use of the device is proposed.)
British farmers are still expecting those imports to arrive despite – or in the current climate, perhaps, because of - what appear to be rocksolid assurances from ministers that such an eventuality will not materialise. Back in November, for instance the Government promised it would not allow chlorinated chicken or hormone-produced beef on supermarket shelves. But then, there are always the catering and ready-meal sectors and when you hear ministerial asides such as “we can’t dictate to other countries how they produce their food” you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s coming. We shall wait and see.
The more obvious solution to our inability to produce enough chicken to feed the nation is for the Government to be more generous in its support for British agriculture and to encourage and grant-aid the expansion of poultry units. If it only allocated a fraction of what was spent bailing out the all-but-collapsed banking system in 2008 that would pay for a huge step towards self-sufficiency.
The chances of this happening are, on the basis of this and previous governments’ records, remote at the very least. Despite Lord Deben’s observations the food retailers (who now control this country’s food policy in the absence of any meaningful Government strategies) are entirely content to carry on importing from countries with appalling environmental credentials, compounding the damage by clocking up thousands of air miles in the process.
And will continue to do so until ministers realise that putting constraints on UK farmers is nothing more than tokenism; wrest control of the food sector back from the big four retailers; and devote some serious thought to dragging us out of the current, highly perilous position of only being around 60 per cent selfsufficient in food. punters, it is widely reported, are ready to stream through the doors in a barely controllable tide.
Tables are being advance-booked by the thousand, thoughts of the lean months of lockdown are already vaporising and the future is rosetinted from sea to shining sea.
Doubtless it will come as a relief to those who have been denied access to their preferred lunch or supper destinations for so long but I suspect not all will be plain sailing.
Particularly if proprietors are tempted to ease up their prices in an attempt to recoup some of the lost ground (though as it was explained to me many pubs have actually been better off closed and Governmentsupported this winter as opposed to losing money hand over fist by remaining open during the typically dead days of January and February).
Because having had to fall back on home cooking for the last ever so many months people are now well acquainted with what food costs and what can be achieved with a few modestly priced ingredients.
And if presented with a tab for a meal for four which equates roughly to what they have been accustomed to spending on the family’s weekly food budget the whole issue of whether eating out really offers value for money may be seriously questioned.
Meanwhile the big question is whether pubs, restaurants and other eateries will be able to muster enough staff to operate once the green flag goes up. Chef-proprietors - the admirable Michael Caines among them – are complaining of a dearth of labour in the catering sector, the result of European workers having returned to Europe and others finding alternative ways of earning a living. Of which there are plenty, and let’s be clear about it, even stacking supermarket shelves or driving a delivery van around the countryside beats working the worst kind of unsocial hours in hellish conditions caught between on the one hand bullying chefs and owners and on the other demanding and sometimes insanely fastidious customers.
The catering sector has never valued its workers, who are generally classed, treated and paid as the lowest of the low and enjoy not even the modest amount of respect for doing a skilled job which hospitality employees enjoy in other countries.
Catering sector wages are generally used as the labour market’s lowerlevel benchmark and rarely reflect the rigours and demands of the job.
Both our children had temporary spells in the catering sector, the Lad working in a country pub where he was well-respected, well-remunerated and thus happy, but the Daughter toiling in a very citadel of sharp practice.
She found it impossible to muster any respect for her rascally employer (or for that matter his odious, sycophantic regulars) when she observed tap water being carbonated and sold as ‘sparkling’ in fancy bottles for three quid a pop and knew that even her meagre wage was being partly subsidised as a result of the proprietor illegally trousering the contents of the ‘tronc’ – the staff tips pool.
She eventually followed a career path into nursing where not only is she valued and paid something close to a salary which reflects her skill but finds herself in far less unsavoury environment. Even if it is a colo-rectal surgery ward.