“British #farming can be one of the leading lights of post-Brexit Britain if government chooses to become a global #leader in championing #sustainable, climate-friendly #food that our farmers produce here.”
It’s also important to remember that 🇬🇧 #agriculture is the bedrock of our £121bn agri-food sector employing 4m people and supplying 62% of our #food. These are big numbers.
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Without making any moral judgement on current production practices, the reason intensive poultry production takes the form it does is because of relentless pressure to be ever-cheaper, from retailers & consumers.
Most of our 🌎 food system is predicated on a race to the bottom on retail cost. But this generates external costs; to welfare, climate & the environment.
Farmers = price takers in a free market system feeding on the planet’s natural capital.
I’m proud to be part of an industry in 🇬🇧 which is already far more sustainable than the global average, with plans to improve at pace, from improving biodiversity to producing climate-friendly food.
Sugar beet afflicted with virus yellows can have yield reductions of up to 80%. No alternative control methods are currently available. And if we don’t grow sugar, demand will stay constant. So we just import cane sugar, right?
It also makes no attempt to demonstrate the incredibly strict parameters of the sugar beet derogation (not the least of which are pest/weather thresholds which were not triggered one of the two years so far granted), very low rates used & 3 year lag time to a flowering crop.
Polarisation on food, farming & the environment, a 🧵
Since 2016 food, farming & the environment have rarely been out of the news. And rightly so: they impact every single one of us. Yet the quality of national debate on these vital issues has been (mostly) dire.
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With the vote to leave the EU in 2016 the UK was presented with a blank canvas for agriculture policy for the first time in 40 years. But the problems began here, with a government needing to find Brexit benefits spinning a line of misinformation about the CAP.
This mostly centred around presenting the CAP as if:
1) it were still the 1980s, with milk lakes & butter mountains & no environmental or rural development funding
2) it only benefitted rich land owners, when in reality smaller tenants were most reliant on it
There are so many basic errors in this piece, it makes me so frustrated that the public see what’s happening in the countryside through such a distorted lens. How can we have an informed discussion when we get the basics wrong - after 6 years!
- ELM is not a ‘farm subsidy’ scheme; it’s payments for environmental actions, largely on an income forgone basis, and will go far wider than farmers.
- It isn’t just for ‘landowners’
- There’s little to nothing in ELM about ‘producing food’.
- ELM was not intended to replace CAP: there is & will be a huge financial shortfall on every English farm, by design.
- CAP was not ‘based on how much land an individual farmer owned…benefitting the wealthiest’. It was based on land tenure, of most benefit to smaller tenants.
.@CommonsEFRA unimpressed at government’s dismissal of its concerns for the impact of the NZ/UK FTA on 🇬🇧 farms, or of its call for MPs to have scrutiny of future trade deals as promised when we ‘took back control’.
Unfortunately, some in government seem keener to back our competitors (in the name of ‘the free market’) than their own domestic producers, who underpin the rural economy & 🇬🇧 food security.
As for those who claim NZ doesn’t want to send meat here anyway ‘because China’, in the real world volumes are already increasing - before the FTA takes effect.
Both produce exactly the same electricity, but nobody would claim the ⚡️ from these two sites has the same emissions footprint.
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⬅️ Left: a monster truck
➡️ Right: a Tesla
Both transport people from A to B, but nobody would compare the two and claim their emissions footprint per mile was the same because ‘they’re both cars’.
You can see where I’m going with this.
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⬅️ Left: cattle in the ashes of some recently cleared 🇧🇷 rainforest
➡️ Right: 🇬🇧 sheep grazing a diverse herbal ley
Advocates of a shift to ‘plant based’ diets make no distinction between the two; they want you to think both are as bad as each other.