UK FARMERS can’t be expected to absorb the costs of increased animal welfare and environmental regulations whilst being made to go toe-to-toe with the world’s biggest agricultural exporters in a post-Brexit trading arena.

This was one of the messages that came out of a webinar organised by the Rural Policy Group, during a discussion on whether Brexit has made the future of farming more sustainable.

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Speakers claimed that farmers had been the sacrificial lambs of Brexit and were now being expected to compete on an unfair playing field with major agricultural exporters like Australia and New Zealand, but without the support from UK Government to help them rise to the challenge.

The director of trade and business strategy at NFU, Nick Von Westenholz said: “What we have is a trade agenda which demands UK agriculture to get more competitive, more productive and to go toe-to-toe in the marketplace with some of the most efficient agricultural producers in the world.

“It is going to be almost impossible to rise to the challenge if our domestic policy actually looks to impose ever more regulations on farming, making it more difficult to produce food at cost,” he explained highlighting some animal welfare regulations and the changing direction of travel towards public money for public good and the phasing out of subsidies.

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“Clearly there is a positive aspect to having robust animal welfare and environmental controls but if we are to do that, it needs to be consistent with our trade policy,” he added.

“At the moment it is not, and all we are doing is throwing open our doors to cheaper produced goods, essentially asking us to compete on an uneven playing field.”

He criticised the reasoning behind claims from the UK Government that these trade deals would make food even cheaper, pointing out that UK food prices are already very low.

“Our analysis is that the effect on consumer prices is likely to be fairly small, much, much, smaller than the effect on UK producers and farm gate prices of mass liberalisation to major agricultural exporters like Australia and NZ.

“Food in the UK is already incredibly affordable. As a country the UK spends, as a proportion of its income, comparatively very little on food, only Singapore and US come lower than UK on that metric,” he explained.

“Even NZ and Australia spend more of their income on food than the UK does, which makes me sceptical when politicians say that consumers and food prices are the main rationale for doing these sorts of trade deals.”

Sixth generation farmer and chair of the national fruit show, Sarah Calcutt, highlighted that producers were facing mounting costs, but that the value of food to the consumer hasn’t changed.

“Costs have risen all the way though the production chain and we have been challenged as a growing nation incredibly this year,” she said, pointing to the ongoing labour challenges and rising inputs costs which are adding to the bottom line," said Ms Calcutt.

“Every single input associated in getting that product to the consumer, no matter what format, the costs have exponentially gone up. There is massive pressure on retailers to manage pricing to ensure food remains affordable to consumers, but then we have the problem of how that becomes affordable to the producer,” she continued.

“Costs are not reflected in what is being presented in front of the consumer and that is the biggest challenge we have for production in the UK. We have reached a point now that it is not an economically sustainable position, because costs have increased but prices for consumers haven’t.”

Liberal Democrat spokesperson for international trade Christine Jardine argued that food production, and particularly farmers, had been the ‘sacrificial lambs in the Brexit deal’ and urged for the UK Government to recognise and value the role of food production.

“I don’t think we should ever look at producing food as a burden. We have taken it for granted for decades and now our government needs to be looking at food production as essential – a fundamental foundation of a strong economy and value it more than we have in the past.”