George Eustice, the former Environment Secretary, has launched a broadside against the UK’s first post-Brexit trade deal with Australia, signed with much fanfare last year. Yesterday, he called the agreement “not actually a very good deal” and argued that the rush of the former International Trade Secretary – somebody called Liz Truss – to get a deal by the G7 summit meant the deal signed was much fairer to Oz than the UK.
Although neither of the pair are still in the Cabinet, one can see this as another step in the Conservatives’ ongoing row over the future of British farming between two camps that have been labelled “Waitrose protectionists” and “Lidl free-marketeers”. The former are figures like Eustice, Michael Gove, or Ben Goldsmith, who see post-Brexit Britain as a potential beacon for higher environmental standards, at the expense of liberalising trade. The latter see leaving the EU as an opportunity to strike trade deals and lower prices.
Consequently, Eustice’s criticism of the deal provides us with an opportunity to ask what our approach to farming, agriculture, and trade should be post-Brexit. All can agree it is right that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) ends. This expensive welfare scheme for French farmers at the expense of Europe’s taxpayers has not only made food more expensive, but has encouraged hyper-specialisation, benefited big farmers against smaller ones, and harmed biodiversity.
It has also left us with a huge trade deficit in food with the EU. Leaving the Customs Union provides us with an opportunity to strike trade deals with countries like Australia, New Zealand, and the United States which will reduce our dependence on Europe and cut food prices. But the corollary of this is asking UK farmers to compete on equal terms with countries whose production methods and systems hold to lower standards than our own and are thus (usually) cheaper.
Understandably, the farmers’ lobby is keen to prevent anything that would leave them facing greater competition. Hence why – even though the Australia deal is only set to lower tariffs over a 10-15 year period – it resulted in a lot of harrumphing from those that represent Old Macdonald and co. The National Farmers Union, one of the country’s most effective lobbies, wants to protect the model of UK farming that has grown up in recent decades: large, specialised, centralised super-farms designed for the export market.
That the UK’s farming sector has ended up dominated by these larger farms is not only the fault of Brussels. Before the First and Second World Wars, Britain was highly unusual in relying on global markets for its food – a consequence of both its imperial status and its policy of complete free trade. Yet after those two close run things post-war governments aimed to increase our food self-sufficiency. By the 1980s, we were over 75 per cent self-sufficient in food, up from under half a century earlier.
Membership of the EU, as well as making us reliant on European markets, consolidated some of the worst tendencies of these processes. Intensive farming methods required specialisation, an end to rotational farming, over-ploughing, and the consolidation of small family farms into ever-larger corporate units. Not only was this bad for the environment or consumers, but it came at the expense of our national resilience. We now only produce around 60 per cent of the food we eat.
That this is an issue should be obvious in light of the recent disruption heralded by lockdowns, the war in Ukraine, and, to a far lesser extent, Brexit. The fragile networks that we relied upon in the halcyon days of globalisation are already coming under increasing threat. The threat of war with China, global turbulence, and climate change all add to those risks. Even sceptics – with whom I have much sympathy – can appreciate the damage intensive farming has done to our biodiversity.
Taking that all together, we can identify several issues that our post-Brexit agricultural policy should encompass. Do we want to maximise free trade, even if it means harming our own farming sector and admitting cheaper products made to a lower standard? How do we insure we are not vulnerable to supply-side shocks? What can we do to protect the livelihoods of our farmers whilst challenging the hold of the largest farms? What is the best way to protect our natural environment and national landscape for future generations?
The “Waitrose protectionists” would, sotto voce, like as little free-trade as possible, whilst increasing our environmental standards (such as by banning live exports) and indulging in some Goldsmithian re-wilding schemes. By contrast, the “Lidl free-traders” couldn’t give two hoots about bringing back wolves, want to sign as many free-trade deals as they can, and see the ultimate virtue as bringing down prices for consumers. Johnson never really chose; Truss was obviously a devotee of the latter.
Where will Sunak fall? As the MP for one of the most rural and farmer-orientated constituencies in the country, his personal sensitivity to anything that will upset the farming lobby is obvious. Nonetheless, there is a clear argument that the free-traders have it right in the short-term – drop the tariffs and let in cheap food during a cost-of-living crisis – whilst the protectionists have it right in the longer-term, in their emphasis on protecting our industry and repairing our environment.
But this argument doesn’t have to be a case of either/or. The free-marketeer in me suggests that we should ape New Zealand, remove all subsidies and tariffs, and force our bloated, CAP-weaned farmers to adapt. That caused Kiwi agricultural exports to rise by 39 per cent over a period of seven years. Yet it is not only efficiency we after here. Otherwise we would be far more interested in agricultural de-regulation than we are. Whilst the Lidl team will defend chlorinated chicken, they are not yet cheer-leading for it to be introduced over here.
The future of British farming must be different to the recent past. We need to encourage a proliferation of smaller, family-owned farms to bring supply and employment back to rural communities. We also need to ensure our industry is designed for satisfying domestic needs first, and then focusing on exports. And we also need to end a culture where market-orientation subsumes our own environment legacy. That is not to say our rural economy cannot become efficient whilst becoming more green.
As such, the debate over the merits of one small trade deal – which even the Government’s own figures predict will only benefit our GDP by a fraction of a percentage point – is a sideshow to a much larger and more important conversation about what our countryside looks like, and what it is for. Whilst the party is hardly short of things to row about at the moment, this is one that it should be having.