Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160
- 166)
TUESDAY 4 JULY 2006
REVEREND ROBERT
BARLOW, MRS
JILLY GREED,
MR ROGER
JAMES AND
MR JOHN
TURNER
Q160 Chairman: That is very clear.
Mr Turner: I will try and keep
my introduction brief. I have described myself as a traditional
farmer. We have heard a number of different viewpoints expressed
by witnesses today which I think reflect the dynamic that is there
in most farming businesses between the need to run them as a modern
business, in other words awareness of commercial markets, global
trade and the impact that might have, but we are also dealing
with wider values within farming, such as animal husbandry, environmental
husbandry, and they have always existed in all farming businesses.
Quite where that balance falls very much depends on an individual
perspective but also the market opportunities. I was driven to
respond to this because when I saw this Vision document, which
was published by Defra and the Treasury, I felt it was a very
dry document that took a very limited perspective. Sure it was
a vision, but it was from a very limited perspective which was
framed by international agreements, the need for addressing global
issues, but local issues hardly figured at all. If you put a word
search in here for "local produce" it does not figure
once, yet "international trade" figures on a number
of instances. Therefore, what I would like to have seen in that
was this wider perspective brought into it. We hear a lot of talk
about moves towards environmental payments and moves away from
production but, at the same time, I think what it fails to reflect
is that the environmental damage which has happened over the last
40 or 60 years in farming has been the result of the policies
and the markets that it is framed in. It is not always down to
farmers being the bad guys, they are responding to external constraints
and drivers in the market. A number of people have already made
the point that if we export production to other countries there
is absolutely no guarantee that those same drivers will not follow
it out there and there is going to be a similar impact on their
environment. There was also mention made of this move from Pillar
1 to Pillar 2 payments, but the Pillar 3 payments, the social
aspects of farming, have hardly figured in that. Farming is interwoven
into every community throughout the country. Somebody mentioned
that within the report you could quite easily have put "washing
machines" as the commodity, and it is certainly true that
you could replace the word "farming" with "shipbuilding"
or "mining" or "steelmaking". It seems to
me that it is being treated as one of those commodities, but if
you pull farming out of a lot of local communities it will have
an absolutely devastating effect on them. The number of industries
that are related to farming, the number of people who are potentially
involved in farming, has been seriously underplayed and not reflected
in this document. There are a lot of ways the Government could
support farming which do not fall under the word "subsidy"
which has been a millstone to farmers. Farming never really benefits
from the word "subsidy", it is a subsidised food production,
the farmers very rarely benefit. In the 1970s and 1980s farming
benefited from the Farm and Horticultural Development Scheme which
allowed farmers to develop their businesses. Once that ended,
we are now seeing a point 20 years later where that investment
in infrastructure has dried up, those buildings are in need of
repair and renewal, and farmers do not have the confidence in
the future to invest anymore. One thing, above all else, that
farming needs is clear guidance for where we need to go, and we
need the confidence to invest in a market that we know is going
to be there in 10 or 15 years rather than what we are getting
at the moment, which is every two or three years having a different
objective put in front of us, trying to turn round a very complex
business and trying to align it with different sources of funding
and different streams of support.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed,
gentlemen, for two challenging and very interesting perspectives
on the Vision document. I have got four colleagues who have indicated
they wish to ask questions. I am going to ask David Drew and Roger
Williams if they will put their questions one after the other
and then ask our two witnesses if they would respond.
Mr Drew: Picking up on what both of you
say, in a sense one of the weaknesses of farming is it does tend
to come from a compromised position, and that is the way that
politicians may want it to at least be perceived. I believe strongly
with what Roger says. I think it is disgraceful that we give the
greatest amount of money to the richest people for reasons that
are very unclear. How would you get farming to respond? I think
it would help politicians if we had a diversity of opinion on
the way that things might be taken forward to at least have this
argument rather than it being a messy compromise all the time.
Q161 Mr Williams: I think Roger James
makes a very good case for hill farming, and at the moment hill
farming is only supported marginally in the Common Agricultural
Policy. At the moment, the Common Agricultural Policy would give
the same amount of support for land which has good soil, good
climate, good growing conditions as for somebody farming in the
most upland areas. Is there a case for having not such a level
playing field but supporting people farming in the most disadvantageous
regions rather than the people who can compete on a world market
producing commodities such as wheat and milk?
Mr James: We live in the hills
and we are 35 miles from what I would determine as good land.
Our rainfall is very high, so basically we have got seven months
of winter. There is nothing wrong with that, I love living there,
I love the people, I love the economy, it is brilliant, but we
do need money to survive one way or another. Possibly they are
going into environmental payments, but the biggest problem is
the people who are in charge of the environmental payments are
educated, they do not quite know what to do with them, I am afraid
to say. A prime example is a friend of mine has got butterfly
orchids and SSSI have told him the maximum stocking rate, you
are not supposed to graze this, you are not supposed to do that,
they have lost them. He has managed that land for over 20 years
and they were there until they told him how to manage them. You
might all laugh but I am afraid that is happening everywhere.
The latest thing we have had to do is biannually trim the hedges.
The population of birds has gone down 50% in about 20-odd years.
One reason is badgers eating the ground eggs, and if we biannually
trim hedges it opens the hedge up which enables the big birds
to get into the little birds. They do not know that, I do. I am
not educated, but you have got to be very careful to ask people
like us—I am not saying me—because we do know what
we are doing, otherwise we would not have survived so long. As
far as money towards the hill areas or the sort of area I am living
in, personally I think there ought to be so much per labour unit
per farm. A lot of farmers' wives are working these days so they
only have one labour unit, not two, but farmers being farmers
find out how to go around these things in a roundabout way. It
is time that was stopped and it is time the money was paid to
the people who work on the land.
Q162 Chairman: Does anybody want
to comment on David Drew's point about a ceiling on CAP?
Mr Turner: Sorry, I thought you
were going to say his point about the need for a more co-ordinated
approach.
Q163 Chairman: You can comment on
that as well, but briefly.
Mr Turner: Whatever strategy we
evolve for the future of CAP, it should be one that involves not
just 16 farmers but gives a forum for a great number of other
farmers to be involved in, but not only those, the public, the
retail sector and others. It would be great if we could sit down
together and develop a strategy. There have been models, such
as the Biotechnology Commission, which have taken quite divisive
issues within farming and brought those together in quite a dynamic
way. It is a shame that model is not replicated in other issues
such as CAP reform.
Mrs Moon: In the first presentation from
Mr Blackett, he said the Scottish Parliament knew better how to
work with farmers. Mr James, you work with the Welsh Assembly,
would you say the Welsh Assembly is more proactive in terms of
its work with farmers? If so, how? I understand also that the
Assembly is withdrawing a subsidy to hill farmers which currently
is in place. I had this from my local farmers this weekend and
I wonder if you would comment on that too.
Q164 David Taylor: I was very interested
in John Turner's suggestions about areas where support can be
justified for farmers. He makes the point that small and medium
farms find it particularly onerous to do some things to maintain
good farming practices: soil testing analysis; demonstration farms;
support for fair trade; all of those, fine, and I can see how
they might work. The one I was surprised at was: "Working
IT systems that simplify record-keeping...". I am astonished,
having come from an IT background, that within the marketplace
there is not some viable worthwhile cost-effective systems that
do just that. Is there really a market void of that kind? Secondly,
and finally, you also talk about areas of support, "...fostering
better co-operation between farmers". We have heard evidence
from time to time that getting farmers to co-operate is not unlike
herding cats because, of course, farmers are proud, independent
and entrepreneurial. How can you break down these things and put
them into a more co-operative context?
Mr James: Carwyn Jones is rumoured
to be taking away our monies. What do I think of the Welsh Assembly
and the way things are going? I think it is another disaster.
You have got another heap of politicians, excuse the phrase, and
all it is doing is taking money out of our kitty. There are too
many compromises and too many tiers of government. We have got
the FUW, the NFU, the Scottish Unions, and whatever, and by the
time our idea gets to the politicians the idea is gone, it has
been watered down that much that the good idea and the good intention
has disappeared. As the gentleman here said, we need more of these
forums for you to get an actual idea of a working farmer. I am
a working farmer, like it or lump it. I am a bit rough around
the edges, a bit blunt, I cannot help that, but I am a working
farmer. I get all my living from agriculture, albeit subsidies,
but that is what I do. Carwyn Jones will be like the rest, he
will get rid of us all if we are not careful. We are a dying industry
and it is a real shame. As you like hills, we live in a beautiful
area and it will disappear and all go back to bracken and that
will be the end of it.
Mr Turner: I too classify myself
as a working farmer but, unfortunately, increasingly I spend two
and a half days of the week just in front of a computer, record-keeping
and keeping things up-to-date. It is bad enough for most farmers
but as an organic farmer there is a further tier of forms and
record-keeping that we have to do, which is purely for the sake
of the audit trails. I know the Government does not have a good
record in implementing centralised IT systems, but I think there
is a very, very good case for doing it within agriculture and
reconciling the diverse schemes there. I realise that the whole
farm approach is intended to address this, but from my limited
experience of it so far I think it has got a long way to go to
reduce the burden.
Q165 David Taylor: What about fostering
co-operation, John?
Mr Turner: With the best will
in the world, there is a need for education for farmers, and I
do not mean that in a disparaging way, but the markets have changed
significantly over the last 20 years and I do not think small
farmers can any longer afford the luxury of being independent
isolated businesses. A lot of the problems within farming can
be traced down to a lack of co-operation.
Q166 Lynne Jones: Mr Turner, you
have emphasised the importance of having confidence for investment,
and Mrs Greed said there was a need for more investment in value-added
production and promotion. One idea in this document is about upfront
payments which would allow investment, what do you think of that
idea?
Mr James: The biggest thing I
see is time. We are working farmers and we have not got the time
to do a lot of these things. From my point of view, what we really
need is a directive from government, with the help of farmers
or as an integrated thing, to set up something to do the marketing.
My trouble is I am a down-to-earth farmer and I cannot do anything
else besides farming because I have not got the time. I cannot
market things because I have not got the time to market them.
Mr Turner: My understanding of
the role of government is to address market failure. We have the
centralised distribution and retailing system which is dominated
by the supermarkets which has framed a certain sort of agriculture
and a certain style of farming. Where I feel there is a case for
public support is to develop an alternative network which provides
a greater choice for people. The seed funding at least will not
be provided by the market at the moment. My feeling is if that
can be brought together there is a viable alternative to the centralised
food distribution system, and there is a very good case for using
public money to build that network.
Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed.
That was excellent. We are going to move quickly to our third
panel of witnesses.
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