Opinion: Politicians, left and right, simply don’t care about farming
© Adobe Stock The sudden unexpected closure of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) in England to new applications is a reminder of the inherent risks to farmers of repatriating farm policy to Westminster from Brussels.
Less than 10 years since the EU referendum result, and barely five years since the UK left the EU, we find ourselves vulnerable to Westminster politicians of every stripe.
It’s not as if the shambolic closure of the SFI is the first indication of the damage that can now be inflicted on UK farmers by British politicians freed from the constraints of abiding by an agricultural policy “common” to the whole of the EU, with secure funding to match.
See also: Opinion – I can’t avoid ‘dreadful’ task of gifting farm to my kids
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Only a matter of months after the UK formally left the EU, at the beginning of 2020, then trade secretary Liz Truss dashed off food trade deals with New Zealand and Australia that have set a timebomb under the UK’s red meat and dairy sectors.
These deals will eventually allow both countries (both of which are very low-cost food producers and, in the case of Australia, have lower farm animal welfare standards than Egypt) to export unlimited quantities of red meat and dairy products to the UK free of all import tariffs.
Even Tory arch-Brexiter and ex-Defra secretary George Eustice described Truss’s deals as “not very good”.
More recently, and more immediately damaging, has been chancellor Rachel Reeves’ shock announcement in her Budget of massive cuts to the old decoupled Basic Payment Scheme payments that were supposed to be phased out only gradually.
Knight Frank predicts these cuts will drop incomes of arable farms by 24%, of lowland livestock farms by 26%, of mixed farms by 34%, and of ‘less-favoured area farms’ by 45% this year.
Some farmers are seeking legal advice about the abrupt closure of the SFI and wonder if there are grounds for a case against Defra for failing to uphold its commitment to a six-week notice period about closure of the scheme (30,000 English farmers are now shut out of any agri-environmental scheme until further notice).
Some arable farmers have even started a “milling wheat strike”, whereby they are delaying delivery of their grain to remind the government of the importance of food security.
Well, good luck with both of those initiatives in terms of changing government policy.
Farming minister Daniel Zeichner recently commented that farmers “are not going to be supported by the public purse forever”.
But if farmers were hoping for some relief from the right of British politics they’d do well to remember that Nigel Farage’s response to US president Donald Trump’s threat of a trade war was to suggest we let in US chlorinated chicken as part of any negotiations. Left or right, no one cares very much anymore.
I used to have a farm sign at the end of my drive painted in EU blue with 12 yellow stars circling it. During the ups and downs of Britain’s EU membership, it was so regularly defaced or vandalised I gave up repairing it.
But, with each passing week, I’m more inclined to dig out the half-used blue and gold paint pots from the back of the farm workshop and once more celebrate the pro-farmer trading block just across the Channel. I suspect the chance of it being vandalised is less than it used to be.