The “unfrozen moment” Michael Gove, the new Defra secretary, called the impact of Brexit on agriculture and the environment in his first speech last week. It’s a deft description of the potential for transformation that leaving the EU offers, which is undoubtedly what Mr Gove intended. But it also conveys foreboding. That would be right too. Redesigning what is by far the most important relationship for the UK’s food and agriculture industry is full of risk – to the price the consumer pays for their food, to the familiar landscape of Britain, and to the complex network of relationships that sustains the rural economy.
The Brexit campaign was as light on the detail of what leaving the EU would mean for food and farming as it was for everything else – except for the claim that it would mean cheap food. Stripped of the costly common agriculture policy, the argument went, and able to import from around the world, the price of food in the shops would plummet. That remains an option. But it would come at a heavy cost. It would spell disaster for the farmers who compromise a little on productivity in order to nurture the environment; if, for example, it meant importing meat from the US, it would probably wreck Britain’s long improvement in farm animal welfare; and if it meant importing GM foods, it would almost certainly end the chance of a trade deal with Europe.
It is to Mr Gove’s credit that he appears to recognise now that a cheap food policy may not be quite the Brexit bonus that some of his colleagues in the campaign anticipated. He also acknowledges that there cannot be a Brexit bonus in terms of immigration for the market towns that felt most exposed to the arrival of large numbers of EU workers; ending free movement would be catastrophic for horticulture and for food processing, which is now the largest manufacturing industry in the country. And he accepts that farming, like every other business with a close EU connection, cannot be driven over the cliff edge of a hard Brexit.
Mr Gove’s big idea in his speech was to replace the CAP’s automatic payments to landowners with a system of payments for public goods, where farmers would receive subsidies for farming in an environmentally sensitive way and perhaps for allowing greater public access. Most farming and rural agencies accept that radical change is coming. So far, so good.
But these changes will come hard to smaller farmers. They will lose the basic income that the automatic CAP payment provides, without having the same opportunity as large landowners to replace it with subsidy for environmental stewardship. So it is likely to accelerate the disappearance of the family farm, and jeopardise the patchwork of small businesses that still give parts of rural Britain like west Wales and the English south-west their distinctive landscape. Further – as Mr Gove now knows – nearly four-fifths of the lamb grown in the UK goes to Europe, so these changes might kick-start the rewilding of Britain’s uplands. There may be good arguments about flood risk and habitat in favour of such a policy, but the human cost could rank with the closure of the mines for its impact on local communities.
Leaving the European Union doesn’t have to be catastrophic for British agriculture. Carefully and thoughtfully managed, it could encourage the sustainable use of land as it becomes an increasingly scarce and valuable resource.
But farming is more closely woven into European law and regulation than any other business. More than half of farm income comes in the form of subsidy. Nearly all the UK’s food regulations are made in Europe. To unpick this relationship is a huge task, the consequences of getting it wrong could be terrible. The hope that we could go into an election in 2022 having left the EU and completed a transition period is a dangerous triumph of ideology over common sense.
