Agriculture and Horticulture

Earl of Shrewsbury Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Shrewsbury (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord De Mauley on securing this debate, especially as during a recent similar debate in the Moses Room it was stressed by those taking part, including my noble friend Lord Caithness, that a larger window for debate was required, reflecting the importance of the subject. Today’s debate is excellent news, therefore, and I welcome the opportunity to consider the situation facing our agricultural industry.

Both my noble friend and the Minister bring with them wide experience, not only in Defra but as participants in the industry. I declare an interest, as a member of the National Farmers’ Union, and as a former president of the Staffordshire & Birmingham Agricultural Society, where I had the pleasure of inviting my noble friend Lord Plumb one day. I am very sorry that he is not here today. We miss him—I have never actually taken part in an agricultural debate without the old boy in here, and we wish him well. Henry Plumb walked around with me; what I wanted him to do was to come to lunch, but I could not keep him away from the farmers, who regarded him as somewhat of a god.

With the result of the recent referendum still ringing in our ears, what better time could there be to explore the needs of the agricultural and horticultural sectors going forward? I voted to leave, as did many farmers and landowners. The road from Ashbourne to Derby was lined with leave posters on agricultural land. That I did not expect to see—nor did I expect the leave supporters to prevail. But we have what we have, and we must get on with it, and grasp wholeheartedly the opportunities and challenges which Brexit inevitably will bring.

We ignore the economic importance of the agricultural sector at our peril. It is the bedrock of the UK’s largest manufacturing industry—food and drink—employing 3.9 million people and being worth an annual £108 billion to the economy.

Currently, agriculture is not an easy business to be in. It seldom is but, particularly at the moment, times are very poor. Milk and meat prices are atrocious, cereal prices are not much better, and one of the few sectors to be fairly buoyant is poultry. My youngest son is a free range egg farmer in Lincolnshire. His business is profitable, but it is subject to vagaries and even small fluctuations in the cost of inputs and in the price of the product, which in turn is almost entirely driven by the decisions of the supermarket chains. He told me yesterday that 1 penny less per dozen makes a very considerable difference to his profitability.

Love them or loathe them, we badly need to grow GM crops on a commercial basis. I believe that they would revolutionise homegrown food production, reducing the costs of livestock, poultry and egg production dramatically, and thus assist those sectors to become profitable. What we now have to do—and I mean immediately—is to plan for life in the horticultural and agricultural industries and indeed in the rural community as a whole, after the cessation of the single farm payment when we leave the EU. A number of politicians have said openly that these sectors will not be allowed to suffer, but, to be quite frank, we have seen so many promises broken by our political classes, so can we really believe their assurances on this issue? Do they really know yet which direction they intend to take us in? Will they have the funding available to continue a basic payment and support through the Rural Development Programme or some such scheme? Will they continue to support the stewardship of our less favoured upland areas, where much of our sheepmeat production comes from? What will happen to our export market for sheepmeat to Europe, which is currently a substantial market for our sheep farmers?

I suggest that we need, like never before since the last war, a new and vibrant domestic agricultural policy, one that is both achievable and sustainable and, yes, profitable to the farmer and producer, giving them a fair return for a very high-quality product. Without adequate profitability, they cannot invest in the future. We have a growing population and declining food self-sufficiency, and these facts must be addressed and action taken. We need to promote British food products through better, clearer labelling. Our customers really care about traceability; they care about high welfare standards—and we have some of the best welfare standards for animals in the world, in this country. They care about quality and, alongside our agriculturalists, they care about our countryside.

The post-war Labour Attlee Government stated their aims for the Agriculture Act 1947 as,

“to promote a healthy and efficient agriculture, capable of producing that part of the nation’s food which is required from home sources at the lowest price consistent with the provision of adequate remuneration and decent living conditions for farmers and workers, with a reasonable return on capital invested”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/11/1945; col. 2334.]

That is an admirable statement, and one upon which we now have the opportunity to modernise and build, but it should also include the word “export”.