Editor’s view: More support for horticulture is common sense
© Magicbones/Adobe Stock When does a falling market become a failing market?
This is a question I suspect farmers will have been mulling a lot since the NFU Conference last week, after Minette Batters had a lively exchange with Defra secretary Therese Coffey about whether the pork or poultry market had failed in the past year.
The government of the day should be comfortable to leave many falling markets well alone.
See also: Editor’s view: Car-crash Coffey contrasts with slick Starmer
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Everyone in business knows there is no guarantee of profit.
Prices have always risen and fallen, and it is vital that this is mostly allowed to proceed in an unfettered way so that supply is as closely aligned to demand as possible.
As a senior Tory herself, it was curious that Dr Coffey did not choose to rebut the NFU’s point on this basis – that any Conservative is reluctant to spend taxpayer money intervening in a marketplace as it has a distorting effect that is frequently unhelpful.
Sharp falls in the price of milk, as detailed this week, are unwelcome, but values could not keep rising forever as it was dragging up supply too quickly.
Yet even the most free-marketeer Tory will acknowledge that some markets do break, and short-term failure can decimate long-term supply.
This is why the Defra secretary has powers under the Agriculture Act to intervene to support markets in England in exceptional conditions.
Retained EU law gives all the devolved administrations the power to act in this way, and the Welsh government is set to grant itself fresh authority to do this if the Senedd’s Agriculture Bill passes into law.
But there has been little debate about what constitutes exceptional circumstances and, as area payments reduce, this has to be addressed.
This need has been masked for a long time as direct payments have helped to smooth out volatility for some businesses, some of the time.
When 50% of the English payment was brought forward last year, the government said it was in part to help with cashflow – but the diminishing amounts are going to have a smaller effect on future bouts of volatility.
And as we know, they were an imperfect tool to manage this anyway.
Beleaguered horticulture or poultry producers without a large acreage would have seen little benefit compared with the often larger dairy and arable farms, which were mostly quite alright without it last year.
It would be unacceptable in future for the rest of the food supply chain to know they can treat farmers with even more contempt than now because the government will always step in to bail them out.
But if big gaps opening up on supermarket shelves and empty glasshouses are not grounds for short-term government intervention to help energy-intensive farmers with their bills, then what is?
The case for other sectors may be more complex, but it is surely in the public interest for a home-grown horticulture sector to be preserved beyond Dr Coffey’s now infamous turnip.
And the long-term cost of losing home-grown salads and vegetables is surely worse than the cost of preserving the sector through the energy crisis.
This is why some food-processing firms rightly fall within the scope of the Energy and Trade Intensive Industry scheme, and why it is so perplexing that farming businesses do not.
If the government isn’t willing to amend this oversight, it should explain why in haste.