EU FARM ministers met this week and their agenda included an early discussion of priorities for CAP reform.

This is about the CAP after 2020, when farmers here will be dealing with a new post-Brexit support policy. Farmers in Scotland would probably quite like the direction of travel in Brussels. 

Making matters worse is that there is still a lack of policy emerging in London. Politicians there could argue there is not the same pressure to get things moving, since it is only one country involved and support equivalent to the CAP is guaranteed until 2020, regardless of what happens with the timing of Brexit.

The headline issues for the EU would translate well into a new support structure for the UK, but this seems unlikely. The plans for the EU are about building resilience, which is risk management and price volatility; research and innovation; environmental challenges; generational change – Commission-speak for young farmer initiatives; rural job creation; market orientation to make farming more competitive; and tackling unfairness along the supply chain.

It is a long way from headlines to a final deal, but if these are the foundations, they look promising for the farmers of what will be the EU 27 after Brexit. They would also be a good basis on which to build new support arrangements in the UK. 

But discussions in Brussels this week and the mood music coming out of London suggest we are now going down very different roads. The new CAP will be different, with less reliance on direct payments. However, reading between the lines it will still be focussed on maintaining farm incomes, with different policy approaches to achieve that. 

This is one of those points in the Brexit process when you realise the changes ahead are for real. For better or worse, we are now heading off in a different direction to the one that has driven the industry for 40+ years, and indeed the core member states of the original EEC for close to 60 years.

The bottom line is that regardless of whether you were a leave or remain voter, and whether you look at the CAP reform debate this week wistfully or with relief that we will not be part of it, we all now have to find ways to make Brexit work. It is the only show in town, but the list of areas where farming needs answers is depressingly long.

This is not only about support structures, although it would be good if the government in London at least produced a priority policy list. The one debated this week in Brussels only ran to three pages, so that should not be hard to deliver at Defra, if Andrea Leadsom has ideas about where she wants to take the industry.

That in many ways sums up the difference between the Defra secretary and the farm commissioner, Phil Hogan – it all comes down to vision, and what drives someone to deliver an outcome they believe will make a difference. 

We know with Phil Hogan that he wants a better, more stable livelihood for farmers based around a new CAP. But despite being in the job for nine months, Mrs Leadsom is still an unknown when it comes to farming issues.

The industry has been patient, but it should use what is happening in Brussels on CAP reform to stress that it has been patient long enough, and wants to see evidence of a plan, ideally one that can be devolved to the regions. If this does not happen, even farmers enthusiastic about Brexit will look to Brussels with some envy.

Brussels this week also brought confirmation that the Commission is planning to mirror the Milk Market Observatory with similar structures for crops and sugar. This is on top of a commitment to set up an observatory for beef. These have their limitations, generally because they are slow to deliver market information. However that lesson is being taken on board and improvements will be made. 

The milk observatory in particular is being improved as part of plans to create a more effective futures market for dairy products. This raises an interesting question about whether and how the UK will pay to make use of these EU services and others after Brexit – but given that Defra has not tackled the big picture issues yet, there seems little prospect of it taking on board the detail.