Farm Support

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for introducing this important debate. It is so good that agriculture has been debated more regularly in this Session than, I think, during the combined past three Sessions. It will continue to be debated because it is a key industry—probably the most affected industry, for those involved with it, when we exit through Brexit.

Although I voted to remain in the EU, Brexit cannot come soon enough for our environment and our farmers. The sooner it comes, the better. The common agricultural policy has been bad for the environment: birdlife on farms has halved since we have been in the CAP, and biodiversity is in constant decline. The common agricultural policy also made the fundamental mistake of separating farming from the rest of the environment, and it has been bad for taxpayers’ money because that has been untargeted. It has been bad for farmers because it has given them the wrong sort of support, restricting their ability to innovate and their opportunities. It has also kept bad farmers in a living when they should have gone, and put the future of our grandchildren at risk.

I say that because farmers need three key ingredients; air, water and, most importantly, soil. It is soil that has not had enough attention. In the UK, we have lost 84% of our soil since 1850. There are, at the most, 100 harvests left. We are losing at the moment between one and three centimetres of topsoil every year, and it takes 1,000 years to create three centimetres of topsoil. If we continue with the way we have been farming under the CAP, there will be no farmers—not even, I say to my noble friend, in Yorkshire. There will not be any in Caithness even with global warming, which is not going to help them. We will have to look at other models.

The recent Chatham House report, published earlier this month, sets out four models. The first is the sector protection model, which has trade barriers and subsidies. This is the model employed by Japan, Norway and Switzerland. The second is the decoupled subsidy model, which is the disastrous EU model that I have referred to. The third is the insurance model, where payments are made to farmers if prices or incomes fall below a certain level, which is the policy employed by the US and Canada. The fourth is the market-oriented model, which is low in subsidies and in barriers to imports. That is the one employed by New Zealand and Australia.

I do not advocate fully that last model, although it has been touted by some. My reason is that it does not take long for the farmer to go from being the hero to becoming the villain. That is the case in New Zealand, where the mistake the New Zealanders made—which I hope we will not make—was to divorce farming from the rest of the environment. The farmers, who were widely praised for improving their productivity, as we need to do, and for competing on the world stage, as we need to do, forgot the environment. The pollution from the farmers has now made them the enemy of the people.

We are hugely lucky in this country that we are 75% self-sufficient in our indigenous foods, which is a great bonus. My noble friend is lucky to have that as the backdrop to producing the 25-year environment plan. I would say to him: please tell us that the plan will include farming and other rural matters. The whole lot is integrated and farmers cannot be looked at on their own any more.

The big question my noble friend and the department are facing is the balance that is needed to have an agricultural sector which operates at world-class standards of productivity and world-class standards of animal welfare and transport, as well as protecting the environment. Behind all that is the old adage coined in 1906 by Alfred Henry Lewis, which was used by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, the other day:

“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy”.