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Mr. Hayes: Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?
Mr. Brown: I should like to give way, but I must move on because time is short for everyone this afternoon.
In February and November 1998, support worth more than £10 million came to Dumfries and Galloway. The region is set to receive a further £7.5 million from the aid package announced by the Government on 20 September, which is almost 5 per cent. of all the moneys and 20 per cent. of Scotland's stake. Farmers in my constituency are grateful for that support, which they would not have received from the Conservative party.
The Government's support for the industry contrasts sharply with the policies being pursued by the Leader of the Opposition, which have fallen off the back of a lorry and are part of his right-wing revolution. They include his calls for a ban on French chicken, pigmeat and beef, not on health grounds but simply because they are French. If the Tories are not prepared to listen to scientific advice when making their decisions, why should they expect the EU Scientific Steering Committee on food and animal health to do so today?
Mr. Peter Luff (Mid-Worcestershire):
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Gentleman said, quite reasonably, that he would not give way because of the 10-minutes rule, but I understand that the clock is stopped to permit interventions during speeches made under that rule. Is that the case?
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
The clock is stopped for the duration of the original intervention, but is started again when the hon. Member who is on his feet replies.
Mr. Brown:
The Tories' policy would lead to a trade war, destroy thousands of jobs and put at risk our multi-billion pound a year exports to France. Ben Gill, the president of the National Farmers Union, described that
I have here a copy of my local newspaper, the Dumfries and Galloway Standard, from Wednesday 27 October. The headline says,
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire):
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is it not odd that in a debate in which Back-Bench speakers are under such pressure, as you have already pointed out, a Member for a Scottish constituency should speak first from the Back Benches on matters that are properly the responsibility--
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. It is not for the hon. Gentleman to challenge the Chair's selection of speakers.
Mr. Brown:
I was explaining that Mr. Struan Stevenson was defeated by myself and the voters of rural Dumfries at the election. As his punishment, he finds himself a Tory agriculture spokesperson in the European Parliament. In his article in The Herald, he does not hide his complete contempt for the policies of the Leader of the Opposition, and warns:
The immature nonsense of the Leader of the Opposition yesterday showed that the Tories have learned nothing from the BSE-inspired war on Europe three years ago. Then, they promised to block treaties and directives, but the only thing that they blocked was the lifting of the export ban on British beef, demonstrating Britain's lack of influence in Europe under the Conservatives.
As for the Tory party's other policies on agriculture, its call for more labelling is already being pursued by the Government through the implementation of tough new laws. Indeed, more were announced yesterday by my right hon. Friend the Minister. They will ensure that shoppers can tell clearly whether the products that they buy are British, and that consumers may show their support for British farmers, as I do, by purchasing their products.
Also somewhat belatedly, the Tories have called for reform of the common agricultural policy, something that is already being pressed for by the Labour Government, and which, during their 18 years in power, the Tories made no serious attempt to achieve.
Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon):
Small foreign wars have always been a traditional distraction from large domestic problems. The French conflict is one such matter. It is an illusion that we are about to bury the French market under thousands of tonnes of beef, ban or no ban. If the problem were solved today, or had never begun, it would have no immediate impact on problems in the United Kingdom.
The French have dug a pit for themselves and fallen into it, and I have precious little sympathy with them. We should concentrate on isolating them, piling the pressure on in the European Union and making their position untenable.
I have no sympathy for the call for a ban on French products, and I shall tell the House why. I cannot imagine a single action more calculated to extinguish the last flicker of life in hill farming in north Yorkshire than encouraging a trade war that puts at risk £136 million worth of live lamb exports to France and leaves the farmers' ferry--a courageous initiative among British farmers to export their lambs--vulnerable to pressure. We should not be in the business of trying to out-gun The Sun when it comes to attacks on our European partners, however wrong they are in this instance.
We have not helped our cause by maintaining the beef on the bone ban. The Minister must knock some heads together in Scotland--I know that he would like to do so--because, otherwise, the tail will be wagging the dog. The ban is a wonderful pretext for the French.
The article in the New Scientist about contamination of carcases by brain tissue during slaughter did not help either. It was, of course, faithfully reproduced in the French press. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail says that we are heading for "a stitch-up". I hope that it is right, because a stitch-up is better than a shoot-out in practically all circumstances.
Two years ago, I said that the hills in my constituency were bleeding. That haemorrhage has not stopped. I shall refer to Skipton auction mart, because I have taken the trouble to find out what is happening immediately and locally.
The first big gimmer lamb sale of the year--for those who do not know, a gimmer is a female sheep--is in September. In 1997, gimmer lambs were fetching £74 a head. In 1998, they sold for £46 a head. At the most recent sale, they fetched £25.13 a head. The hill farmer is the one who suffers. His draught ewes--ewes that have had three or four crops of lambs--are usually sold down the hill to the lowlands, where they may continue productivity in slightly easier conditions. Three years ago, they sold for between £50 and £60 a head. Last year, the price was £35 a head, and today it is £20 a head. Shearlings--sheep that have been sheared once--were fetching £60 in 1998, but now sell for £38.
At the end of September, 659 old ewes were sold but 689 were given away. In one pen, in which there were 41 ewes, one was sold for £1 and the other 40 were given
away free with it. The problem is the requirement to split sheep. Ewes could be worth £8 to £10 for export without that requirement which we have imposed. I hope that the Minister will review that urgently.
I took the precaution of talking to the man in my constituency who probably knows most about cattle--the knackerman at Bentham. He has an enormous constituency of his own, which covers north Lancashire, Craven and Cumbria, and even stretches into Scotland. Normally, at this time of year, Mr. Robinson is called out for the casualty kill of about 200 calves a week. At the moment, he is being called out for about 530 to 600 calves a week. Of course, those calves are shot for nothing. The knackerman takes them off and gets a fiver for the hide, and the farmer puts them down as stillborn because there is no price for them. A few--the better end of the Friesians--are kept on.
As for the sheep, some are taken by traders to the ethnic markets in west Yorkshire, where there is a demand. Others are shot for £8 on the farm and thrown straight into specified risk material because there is no market for them.
Bentham mart is tiny; we would normally expect about 150 calves a week to go through it. At the moment, 30 are going through. The mart is in the habit of paying farmers' sons about £4 an hour to help manage animals. Now, farmers who are 50 years old and more are queueing for those jobs in order to supplement their incomes because they are receiving so little from their stock.
Nationally, one would reckon at this time of year that about 13,000 calves a week would be presented for the processed aid scheme--that was last year's figure. Now, if we estimate that perhaps 7,000 are retained on the farm and about 3,000 are going into veal, that leaves 3,000 to 4,000 that are being killed on the farm because there is no future for them, and farmers do not want to pay the cost of tagging such animals.
At this time of year, cull cows are put forward. Under the maximum weight of 560 kilos, they are fetching 51p a kilo. So the maximum price for a calf culled from--probably--one of the suckler herds is £285.60.
Seven dairy herds in my constituency have been sold at the Skipton mart alone since mid-summer. The smaller farmers are selling weekly as the animals calf. Because it has been a good year for forage, grass has been good and the quality of feed high, people have overestimated quotas of milk production, resulting in 1 million litres of milk being sold a few days ago at Skipton mart. It was leased for an average of 6.53p a litre, rising to 7p. That is for farmers who will receive perhaps 17p a litre for the finished product.
As my hon. Friends have said, the situation is worst in the pig sector. I have talked about livestock because such production is the predominant form in my constituency. There are offal and bonemeal disposal costs. I am pleased that the Minister is seeing whether he can return some value to that product.
The threat of the new integrated pollution prevention and control regulations has been mentioned. By charging for the new sheep-dip regulations, the Environment Agency is already making itself extremely unpopular. We have been told that a unit of 2,000 finishing pigs or 750 sow places could cost £12,000 a year in inspections, with a registration fee of about £18,500. I hope that the
Minister will be able to give some indication of what is intended, and, even better, that he will defer whatever he was intending in that regard.
We ought to be careful in one regard when talking about pigmeat. It is true that pigmeat is imported, but the largest supermarkets that are importing almost invariably require the same conditions in the pigs imported as they do for those that have been raised in the United Kingdom. We should not give a false impression that, somehow, every pig that is imported has been raised in ghastly conditions, but that every UK pig has been living in pristine surroundings. The salmonella count might correct that.
What is the Government's response? The Minister, like some slightly unctuous parson from a Jane Austen novel, wrings his hands over the open grave and tells the family how he quite understands their grief, but that, at the end of the day, we are all in the hands of the Lord--or at least the Treasury.
Government action has been largely to defer new burdens on farmers--such as abattoir charges or cow passports--to defer cuts in support, which, admittedly, the Minister increased, but which he would otherwise have decreased, and then to brandish the new burdens. It hardly relieves a farmer's present hardship to be told that an extra burden will no longer be imposed.
I mention, simply for the record, that so far the cost to the public of the BSE inquiry is £32 million, half of which has come from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food budget. Where it will end, no one knows. I shall be interested to see what the positive outcomes of that are.
We accept that there are things that the Government cannot be held responsible for, or cannot influence. The level of the pound is a major handicap to the industry. We can talk ad infinitum about the Government setting out their perspective on economic and monetary union, but we have had that debate before and it obviously will not coax them into more positive action. What can we do? It is important to lift the beef on the bone ban, because by doing so we remove the last pretext for those who do not wish to import our beef. We must also make it clear that no new charges will be imposed in the present crisis.
The Minister should end the requirement to split sheep carcases. He should also pursue his inquiries about the means of helping the pig producer by giving some value to the products that he now has to discard--offal and bones.
We need to know--I am pleased to hear that we shall shortly hear--how the Minister proposes to remodel the hill livestock compensatory allowance, the upland payments that make up the entire net farm income in my constituency. I hope that he will also consider company specification in the pigmeat sector, which his officials have discussed, and whether it would be more transparent to move to a national specification so that farmers at least know what is happening to their pigs in the slaughterhouses.
"Council says 'non' to ban on French beef".
A motion was put before the council on Tuesday which called on the council to consider banning French goods. Councillors rejected the very call for a ban by some people. The Tory group on the council said that any boycott or ban would mean that
"the only losers would be Scottish farmers."
Yesterday, The Herald featured an article by Struan Stevenson, who was the Tory candidate defeated by myself and the votes of people in rural Dumfries.
"In our enthusiasm for kicking the French, we seem to have forgotten that they are perfectly capable of kicking us back."
Mr. Stevenson also calls for cool heads to sort out the French ban on British beef, which certainly rules out the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague), and makes it clear that the responsibility for taking action against the French rests with the European Commission.
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