SCOTTISH FARMERS should be patting themselves on the back. They are the backbone of the UK’s agricultural exports. Admittedly they have had a lot of help from the marketing departments of the Scotch Whisky industry, but Scotland also produces most of the smoked salmon and cashmere products that the UK exports, while at least one enterprising Scottish farm is producing Wagyu beef. It is as if they knew that the UK would sign a trade deal with Japan, or maybe thought they would be able to start a trend for Wagyu in the UK? But either way they took a risk setting up a new style of farm and producing a different product and it looks like it will pay off, as the UK’s new trade deal with Japan includes the sale of £75m of UK beef as well as salmon and whisky exports.
But this potential windfall for Scotland may not be the herald of similar trade deals in the future. According to several newspapers the International Trade Secretary, Liz Truss and the Environment Minister, George Eustice, have agreed to put the Trade and Agriculture Commission onto a 3-year statutory footing. This Commission will be tasked with producing an ‘independent’ report on the impact on UK farming, of any trade deal negotiated by the Department for International Trade, before that deal is scrutinised by parliament.
A statutory Trade and Agriculture Commission may not sound like a problem – until you see who is on the fifteen member Commission: there are representatives from the National Farmers Union (NFU) England, The NFU Scotland, NFU Cymru, the Ulster Farmers Union and The Farmers Union of Wales as well as someone described as simply a Lamb Farmer although the internet describes him as an environment activist from Totnes, England. But either way, six out of fifteen commissioners are UK farmers or Farmers Unions. There are also four representatives from food retailers as well as a former Chief Vet, a former Trade Minister, a representative from an environment group, a trade lawyer and a representative from Trade Out of Poverty.
While the final five members all sound as if they could advise the Government independently, I cannot help feeling their voices will be drowned out by those of the farmers unions, who are wealthy enough to have recently used PR companies, gullible journalists and celebrity chefs to wage a campaign against a US-UK trade deal. Now the same NFU will be writing the official evaluation of any US-UK trade agreement.
However, The UK’s largest agricultural export is Whisky, exporting just under £5 billion of Scotch in 2019. The UK’s largest Scotch Whisky market was the US, buying over £I billion worth in 2019, more than the next three markets, France, Singapore and Taiwan, added together. However while The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) was berating the UK Government for being too slow in negotiating a Trade deal with the US, the NFU was proselytising against US agricultural products in the national media.
Why would the NFU do this? A US-UK trade deal would not only benefit Whisky producers, but also barley growers, cashmere producers and potentially UK Lamb farmers as well. More importantly why has the Government asked a group with such obvious bias to evaluate trade deals?
The need for Imports
There is an ingrained belief in most people that exports are somehow better than imports, but if we can purchase goods more cheaply from other countries than we can produce them ourselves, why would we not we do this? The whole country benefits from less expensive food. The UK has been importing food for hundreds of years, including while they were members of the EU, even though EU agricultural products were more expensive than the UK’s previous Commonwealth suppliers.
The fact that the UK is a net importer of food is evidence that our farmers are not producing enough to even feed the UK’s present population, so why attempt to block a trade deal with the US? With just under 9.1 million hectares of farmland in the UK, slightly less than in 2004, but with a population that has increased by 7 million people since then, I fear that it will be UK consumers whose voices will not be heard on this new Commission.
In 2019, the UK was a net importer of 14 per cent of the beef, 9 per cent of the chicken and 34 per cent of the pork that the UK consumed. Since the 2016 referendum there has been only a small increase in the size of the UK’s lamb, chicken and pork production. While incredibly the number of UK beef cows has actually dropped by 60,000 since 2016. It takes years to build up a beef cattle herd as the incidence of multiple births is less than one percent and every heifer kept for breeding rather than being sent to market is forgone income. Sheep herds are slightly easier to increase as some breeds routinely produce multiple offspring, while pig herds are the easiest to enlarge with litters of 8 to 12 piglets twice a year. But not enough UK farmers have chosen to increase their production, or possibly their farms have reached their maximum carrying capacity. In which case, we should be importing the food we need from the world’s most efficient producers not just from countries that pose no competition to NFU members. Without competition there would be no reason for UK farmers to ever become more efficient, while their new ability to restrict imports could even allow them to become less efficient.
However, UK food shortages are not entirely UK farmers’ fault: they have had their hands tied by EU regulations that banned many innovative techniques that could make the UK’s small amount of farmland more productive. But unfortunately, instead of lobbying the government to allow them to use these innovations now that the UK has left the EU – the NFU has tried to demonise innovation. Even hormone implants, which produce more lean beef per head of cattle and kilo of feed and could actually help UK farmers produce enough to supply the UK market, have been a target. Despite the NFU’s protestations, this practice leaves only miniscule traces of hormones in the meat compared, for example, to the hormones contained in a hops-based IPA or a soy latté.
But isn’t this about animal welfare?
Although the Guardian claimed that the government had ‘finally vowed not to allow chlorinated chicken or hormone-fed beef on to British supermarket shelves’, the UK government had already blocked both products when they imported all of the EU’s regulations as part of the EU (Withdrawal) Bill in 2018.
The NFU has paid for a lot of PR to convince Daily Mail readers that the farmers’ complaint is not about competition but about animal welfare and yet the two issues the NFU is most worried about, do not hurt the animals at all. Pathogen reduction treatments happen after the chickens have been slaughtered. While a hormone pellet injection is no more painful than microchipping your dog – yet no one is suggesting we stop micro-chipping our pets.
The only animals UK regulations can protect are our own. If we choose not to trade with a country because they dock their pigs’ tails or force feed their geese, (two EU practices the NFU is also unperturbed by) that will not change conditions for those animals.
The NFU claims the US requirement to wash chicken meat after slaughter is to disguise the chicken’s ill treatment, while housed in massive industrial farms. But UK chicken meat has higher levels of campylobacter than US chicken – does that mean UK chickens are kept in similar conditions as chickens in the US? Well, yes: 90 per cent of UK chickens are raised to the UK’s minimum standards in massive sheds. And the Guardian has published some of the best exposes of these British mega farms. The only real difference is that UK chicken meat is not washed after it is slaughtered, even though according to the NHS website recent studies have found that 50 per cent of the chicken sold in the UK carries campylobacter bacteria.
UK farmers should not fear trade but look for export opportunities
UK farmers should not fear import competition: the developing world has developed. The OECD estimates there are now 3.2 billion middle class people in the world and that by 2030 this number will be 4.9 billion. As people become more prosperous, they eat more protein.
Will the Trade and Agriculture Commission become just another ineffective Quango, or will they advise the government to limit agricultural imports and force UK farmgate prices to rise – causing hard-pressed British families to pay unnecessarily high prices for their food while also preventing potential exports?
International trade should be about improving consumer choice and promoting competition in the market; however, it would be unrealistic to expect these farmers unions to overlook their own interests for the greater good and recommend a trade deal with a country with significantly lower agricultural production costs. What industry group would? Even though a trade deal may be less advantageous for some UK farmers, it might be hugely beneficial for other parts of the UK economy or to UK consumers.
It should be British consumers who decide if they want to buy imported food regardless of what trade agreements have been reached. But there is a possibility a statutory Trade and Agricultural Commission, dominated by the NFU, will not only prevent UK consumers from having that choice, it could also limit the growth of the UK’s most valuable agricultural export industry – Scotch whisky!
Photo by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay
