Devon gives NFU a rough ride

30 April 1999

Devon gives NFU a rough ride

By John Burns

DEVON farmers have told National Farmers Union (NFU) president Ben Gill that they want an upper limit on subsidy payments.

And they are outraged that the unions London-based policy committee has rejected their demands for support payments to favour smaller family farms.

Only Anthony Gibson, the NFUs south-west regional director, apparently knew that NFU headquarters had rejected the demands made in the resolution.

Bill Norman, who proposed the resolution, said: “That resolution has not gone to HQ council – which I always thought was the governing body of the NFU.

“I feel people in areas such as Wales and Lancashire, where there are large numbers of small farmers, were not given the chance to discuss this proposal.”

Mr Gill was told at a farmers meeting in Exeter last week that 95% of farmers in the south-west were in favour of some form of upper limit on subsidies.

Exeter farmer Raymond Burrough told the president he was out of touch.

“You chaps in the eastern counties havent a damned clue about things down here,” he told Mr Gill.

Nick Westcott, an Exmoor farmer, said: “If you get a few farmers getting huge amounts of money it will be bad publicity” for the whole of the industry.

Unless something like an upper limit on subsidies was put in place, NFU members would leave the union in droves, Mr Westcott warned.

Mr Gill insisted that the industry should be working on the big issues that would really make a difference, instead of pulling each other to bits over details.

But Mr Westcott retorted that capping subsidies, an indea also known as modulation, was not a small issue.

“Unfairness is a pretty big thing, not a small thing,” he said.