Food and Farming visits Downing Street

By Chris Benfield

HILL farmers have been called on to come up with their own ideas for keeping their trade alive in the face of economic pressures which appear to make them economically unviable.
James Paice, the Conservative Party's shadow Minister for food and farming, told a delegation from Yorkshire he accepted upland farmers needed long-term help so they could play their part in maintaining the landscape which brings tourists and keeps shops and other services alive.
 
He said party leader David Cameron's speech about the need to secure British production of food, at the NFU conference two weeks ago, was part of a deliberate effort to put their considered view on the record.
 
He said: "We have to still pay money into the hills“ call it subsidy or whatever you like. Farming in the hills is never going to be purely an agricultural activity. The big challenge I face is trying to devise the right way. I confess I am wrestling with it. Having accepted that public money has to go into the hills, it is a question of finding the right mechanism."
 
He sympathised with the farmers' complaints about the current government's strategy of switching money from direct support, in the form of Hill Farm Allowances and Single Farm Payments“ the residues of the old subsidies systems“ into environmental stewardship and general rural support schemes
They said farmers were losing the money too quickly and it was not coming back to those who needed it most, because of the cost of qualifying for it.
They told him they had to pay thousands of pounds to consultants just to get the immensely-complicated application forms filled in.
 
Mr Paice told the Yorkshire Post after the meeting that the Labour schemes were too bureaucratic but he broadly agreed with their strategy of decoupling subsidy from past production.
 
Any government would need the flexibility to re-direct the money to serve the environment as well as providing food.
 
He believed that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which have stuck more closely to payments based on history, were beginning to realise they had made a mistake“ although average upland farm incomes there are far higher
 
 
He said: "You can say I am appealing to all farmers. You
Tell us what the answer is."
 
Mr Paice was at a meeting in Westminster with five farmers from the
Dales-based pressure group Food&Farming4Real.
 
It was set up to highlight the fact that many small hill and moorland
farmers are crumbling under the pressures of grant changes, bureaucratic costs and low prices caused by competition from other countries.
 
Movement restrictions imposed in response to last autumn's foot and mouth scare and the arrival of the disease bluetongue are adding further pressure.

 
Former Tory leader William Hague organised the meeting, in response to lobbying from Alastair Davy, one of his constituents in Richmond, North Yorkshire, and an organiser of the campaign. Skipton and Ripon MP David Curry, Whitby and Scarborough's Robert Goodwill and the Vale of York's Anne McIntosh were also there.
 
The delegation went on to present a dossier at 10 Downing Street.

chris.benfield@ypn.co.uk