Nigel Evans Meets Members Of The NFU
After meeting with local farmers in the Ribble Valley Nigel discusses the challenges they face.
Today I met with several farmers from the Ribble Valley who expertly updated me on the state of farming in our area… and it is pretty tough.
It’s bad enough trying to make ends meet with the job itself, but then the dead hand of Brussels and London interfere to make it worse. More expensive regulations are seen as the answer to almost everything, but these new regulations like the nitrate vulnerable zones, could mean farmers going to the wall in greater numbers than the 2 a day presently.
Like a lot of these measures they start from good intentions, but the unintended consequences are dire.
It’s almost as if our political masters sat down and said what actions can we take that could bring a vital and historically important industry to its knees…..and then served up what has befallen them for the past few generations.
Farmers are also caught in the headlights of the immense supermarkets and food processors. Farmers do all the essential work but in return are denied a fair whack for their work.
Milk is an excellent example. We import the stuff into the UK but could produce much more of our own. Many farmers are receiving less than the cost of production for their milk. They are even facing enormous amounts of imports of cheese from Ireland and other countries.
When I was last in a supermarket I noticed “fairtrade” coffee and “fairtrade” tea or bananas from developing countries but no “fairtrade” on the one basic dietary item that is turning many of our dairying farmers into a development status all of their own.
What is happening is an exodus of dairy farmers from the land, followed by the refusal of new young entrants to come any where near an udder. The UK is now in the midst of a 40 year low on the production of milk. If the trend continues this will have a disastrous impact on our countryside and the rural way of life. It will rob urban dwellers of their Sunday jaunts to remote and pretty villages made alive by a living and working farming industry.
There are many other problems that are berating the industry from electronic IDs for sheep, to passports for cows, to missing ear tags on animals that could cost the farmer dear, to feed stuffs rocketing along with fertiliser prices going through the roof.
Sheep production is dropping at the rate of 3% a year, begging the rarely asked question over food security. People look at over laden shelves creaking under the weight of boundless supplies of food without ever asking the question what would happen if something dramatic happened which simply dried up supplies. Turning to farmers to step into the fray would be somewhat ambitious as most of them would have shuffled themselves off to more lucrative employment… perhaps in a quango.
The current system is failing them and consequently will fail us. Now is the time to ask what swift action is needed to breathe new life into farming?
I am a mighty defender of the free market, but in this case the free market means the freedom for one group on one side of the equation to dominate the others. The cost structure and regulatory burden is simply mind blowing.
Maybe, just maybe we should try something different.