Brexit: Trade in Food

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish]

Thank you, Mr Gray, for that clarification.

Farmers offer vital support to the rural economy, with the food and farming industry generating more than £110 billion a year, and employing one person in eight in the country. Food and drink, much of it produced in this country, is a vital industry, and the way our food is produced is so important for our natural environment, as we can see in many parts of the country.

The Secretary of State was in Exmoor and Devon last week, where the farming of sheep and cattle produces that lovely landscape with many natural features. Within those natural features is a managed farm landscape, which is why the profitability of food and agricultural production is so necessary. We can look at environmental payments, but they will not be able to replace the profitability of agriculture and food production entirely. The two need to go hand in glove, which we are really keen to see happen.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As a member of the EFRA Committee, I apologise for not being able to stay for the whole debate; I am on the Ivory Bill Committee, which sits again at 2 pm.

I entirely support what the Chair of the Select Committee says about the need for much greater clarity and strategic direction from the Department, but it is also important that we hear a lot more from the Department for International Trade and the Department for Exiting the European Union. I asked about rules of origin and their impact on the food sector this morning and got a very disappointing response. Does he agree that all three Departments need to send a clear message to farmers and food producers about what the future holds for them?

[Neil Parish]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention and for the excellent work that she does on the Select Committee. She makes a very good point about geographical indicators. Interestingly enough, when the Secretary of State visited Exmoor and Devon last week, there was talk of giving protected geographical indication status to Exmoor, where we can sell lamb from both sides of the border—from Somerset and from Devon.

All those things are intricately linked to the need for a future food policy, so that people know where their food has come from and so that we can market it better and, hopefully, get a better price for the producer. That money can then be linked back to the landscape. I cannot emphasise enough that the landscape and the food production, especially in certain parts of the country such as big livestock areas and more marginal land, are intricately mixed.

We must also ensure that we have high-quality vegetable production. Where we can produce organic vegetables, we should; where we can produce vegetables with fewer pesticides and fungicides, we should. We must be very positive about a food policy. I am worried that in the recent Command Paper on health and harmony, the only real talk of food production was very much at the high end. The high end of food production is great—from local restaurants, to tourists buying food and to everything linked to the countryside. However, we also need affordable food that the whole population can eat.

At least 90% of our food business goes through our major retailers, and people often buy on price. As we move forward, we have to be assured that our vegetable production not only is of good quality, with high welfare standards, but comes at a price that the average consumer can afford to—and will—pay. Whatever we buy in life, it is a choice, so not only do we want to have good, high standards, but it needs to be affordable.

We have a managed landscape with many natural features, as I said. The onus is on the Government to engage more closely with the industry to provide the food and farming sector with greater clarity. Tit-for-tat tariffs will do more harm than good—just look at the situation in America. The Americans have started putting tariffs on steel and aluminium. That might well help the steel and aluminium industries in America, but it will drive costs up for the industries in America that need to use those products. Food, a commodity and a manufactured product, does not need tariffs on it. In the end, that will only create more costs and could well lead to higher prices to consumers. I do not believe that those tariffs will ever come back to the producer.

It is imperative that we have a farming-focused free trade agreement with Europe. I repeat what has been said day in and day out in this House: two years since the referendum, all sectors—not just the farming sector— need some clarity on the direction in which we are going. People in all lines of business need to make investments, but those in the beef and dairy sectors in particular need to have a long-term view of where the world is going in order to make investments.