‘No help coming’ for farmers facing hugely squeezed margins

Farmers have been warned not to expect financial support packages from the UK government to help them manage soaring production costs.

This is despite the 2020 Agriculture Act making provision for government to intervene in exceptional market circumstances.

Speaking during an evidence session of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) committee on Tuesday (6 December), Defra secretary Therese Coffey turned down requests to offer direct support to English farmers, dismissing ideas such as giving the industry access to “soft” credit.

See also: Government inaction risks further food shortages, NFU warns

“I’m not going to pretend that there is going to be all sorts of extra packages coming in,” she said.

A suggestion that supermarket buyers had not reacted quickly enough to high input costs, concentrating instead on “very, very keen pricing’’, came under scrutiny, with the committee told that retailer profits were up 97% on pre-pandemic levels.

But the Defra secretary said she would not be “particularly critical” of supermarkets.

“I think that, overall, having a competitive supermarket environment has done a lot to help consumers,” she said.

But Ms Coffey believed that it was important that the industry “keeps talking”. “We have played a role in convening people together, but I don’t think we are at a stage of doing market interventions directly when it comes to pricing.”

ELM delays

The Defra secretary also had few updates on the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme, other than to say more details on standards and payment rates would be published in January.

The delays were posing a real threat to tenants, the Efra committee heard, with landowners refusing to renew tenancies and other agreements until they saw the small print for the new environmental scheme.

Challenged on this, Ms Coffey replied: “We can’t commit to monitoring ever single (tenancy) contract around the country.”

The continuing uncertainty has prompted an angry response from farmers.

NFU deputy president Tom Bradshaw told Farmers Weekly that the delay is “simply not good enough” for farmers who face cuts to their Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) payments and urgently need to plug that gap.

“There are members in all parts of the country that simple don’t have the opportunities to reclaim the BPS monies that have been taken away from them,” he said.

“All we are asking for is clarity and certainty. Defra is failing the industry if it does not bring that clarity forward.”

Public access

One element of ELMs – public access – was directly addressed by Ms Coffey at the Efra hearing.

Responding to a suggestion that this had been dropped, she said that public access would need to be “much more carefully managed” under the new scheme to achieve biodiversity targets rather than having a “free for all”.