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The National Farmers Union has warned the government that it cannot import its way to food security, as it reported business confidence among UK farmers hitting an all-time low this year.
Farmers have cautioned that food production is being eroded as the sector struggles to maintain crop yields amid record rainfall and crushing input costs, while navigating the transition to a new farming subsidy scheme.
“Simply believing we can import our way out of this problem is naive at best and foolish at worst,” said the new president of the NFU, Tom Bradshaw, who took over from Minette Batters earlier this year. Speaking at the launch of the NFU’s annual farmer confidence survey, he added that the government had taken food security for granted.
Business confidence among farmers is at its lowest since the NFU began surveying for the measure in 2010. In the poll of nearly 800 farmers and growers released on Monday, 65 per cent of respondents said their profits were declining or their business would not survive.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to maintain the proportion of homegrown food consumed in the UK at its current level of 60 per cent, as part of an effort to win over rural communities ahead of a general election expected this year.
However, struggling farmers fear government policies are having the opposite of the desired effect. Eighty-six per cent of farmers surveyed said the phaseout of the EU subsidy payment would negatively affect their business. The government has replaced the subsidy with a scheme that rewards farmers for greener practices.
“There is an inevitability that the [Basic Payment Scheme] phaseout has sped up structural change in the industry,” said Bradshaw.
Ahead of an expected general election later this year, Bradshaw said the rural vote was “up for grabs”, and that farmers were looking for policies that underpinned food production.
The Conservative party is at risk of losing some of its core rural seats at the general election.
A Survation poll for the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) found the Conservatives would lose 53 of the 96 rural seats they hold now, and that Labour would win 51, up from three in 2019.
Victoria Vyvyan, CLA president, said rural communities were “politically homeless” for the first time in a generation. “After decades of economic neglect, it’s no surprise to see shifting allegiances in the countryside,” she said, commenting on the results of last week’s local elections. “Tory losses demonstrate traditional loyalties no longer apply.”
Eight-thousand farming businesses have closed since 2019, constituting a more than 5 per cent drop to 141,000, according to official statistics, as farmers failing to maintain profitability have sold to larger farms that have capital to reinvest in technology to boost efficiency.
“Those family farms are at the heart of our rural economies. If we lose the family farm we will never get it back,” said Bradshaw.
Food production, meanwhile, has been hammered by extreme weather as a result of climate change. England has just experienced its wettest 18 months since 1836, leaving swaths of agricultural land flooded and farmers struggling to harvest or plant new crops.
At the end of April, just 45 per cent of winter wheat was in good condition, compared with 88 per cent last April, according to the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board, an advisory body.
A March survey of this year’s harvest so far showed the area planted compared with last year fell 15 per cent for wheat and 22 per cent for barley. But that number will be even higher in the next survey owing to the persistent rain, the AHDB said.
