Since it has been a few years since our new prime minister, Liz Truss, held the Defra brief, I thought I might bring her up to date on a few pressing matters in agriculture…
Dear Liz,
Welcome to Downing Street. Between changing the wallpaper and clearing away all that old birthday cake, I’m sure you’ve got plenty on, so I thought I’d help on the food, farming and environment front by putting together a brief five-point action plan for you:
1. Safeguard the food supply chain
We’ve seen time and again since 2020 that the plentiful supply of affordable food isn’t a given.
Farmers are experiencing unprecedented challenges in securing and financing the basic inputs needed to produce the harvests for the coming year.
Fuel costs have doubled, fertiliser quadrupled, and the gas and energy many enterprises rely on have increased in price up to tenfold on 2021 levels.
Crops will not be grown for 2023. Domestic fertiliser production is in jeopardy, and if CO₂ runs out, again, there will be massive effects across the food sector.
Securing and prioritising affordable energy and CO₂ are national security priorities.
2. Access to labour
We need to remove the shackles from our food producers by giving them access once again to the skilled and experienced migrant labour they need.
Brits won’t do it, and the horticulture sector alone is at least 30,000 workers short.
This year, £60m worth of British fruit and veg have rotted in the fields, and more than 50,000 healthy pigs have been culled and burned for want of labour.
Our national diet of “increased sovereignty” is yielding a bitter harvest.
3. Appropriate funding for Environmental Land Management/Defra
“Ringfencing” the historic £2.4bn of CAP money we inherited from the EU is not sufficient for the scale of our stated ambitions for the environment, climate and food production.
It is a figure from a different time for different purposes.
The payment rates for the Sustainable Farming Incentive were insufficient to encourage farmer take-up before 2022 – they’re laughably so today.
You need to put our money where your government’s mouth is and fund your policies appropriately, or you will miss all your environmental targets.
4. No more damaging trade deals
The promise of cheaper food via post-Brexit trade deals was always an illusion: all you’ve achieved is to damage domestic production via painfully disadvantageous free-trade agreements to get quick newspaper headlines.
Government modelling – which you saw – showed a £94m hit to British farmers from your Australia deal alone.
It is time to start batting for our own, not our trade partners’, interests. We must also remove needless obstacles to trade with the EU, our most important export market.
5. Statutory commitment to domestic food security
You need to take food security as seriously as energy security. The world is becoming less stable; climate change is affecting global food production.
You must enshrine sensible food production targets into law, to avoid the real risk of supermarket shortages and panic that would make Covid lockdown one look like a dress rehearsal. “The markets” are far from infallible.
Unless you want your premiership to be remembered for food riots and civil unrest, I humbly suggest you take a grip of these issues before they take a grip of you.
Yours sincerely,
Joe
