Back to HOMEPAGE Let battle rage on all fronts
Edwin Gillanders
Editor, Farm North East
Filed 07 Aug 08
©Edwin Gillanders
This article was originally published in the August 2008 issue of Farm North East.
It is reproduced here with the kind permission of
Edwin Gillanders, Editor of the Journal
“Viva la France!” might well by the unlikely cry of British farmers as French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, threatens to veto the proposed agreement on world trade which threatens to sell European agriculture down the river.
Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, is unabashed that the deal he hopes to secure – and may well have finalised by the time you read this – will wipe billions of euros and pounds from the incomes of European farmers and threaten future food supplies. And all at a time when food security is shooting up the political agenda world-wide.
Mandelson hardly covered himself in glory in his UK political career and was shunted off to Brussels to keep him out of the way. Ironically, he is causing more political turmoil in his European role than he might have done at home!
Unfortunately, Mandelson’s disdain for agriculture and food production is all too symptomatic of a society becoming increasingly divorced from its rural roots.
Many examples of this malaise have emerged in recent weeks which have had the farmers’ unions battling on all fronts to prevent legislation drafted by bureaucrats in their ivory towers, with no understanding of the practicalities of farming, being thrust upon an already beleaguered industry.
A case in point is the proposal from Brussels for the double tagging and eventual electronic identification of sheep which is a needless imposition on hard-pressed sheep farmers and shepherds and will do nothing for the traceability it is supposed to improve.
The point has been well taken by the chairman of the European Parliament’s agricultural committee, Neil Parish, who is a farmer himself, when the NSA took him up a Perthshire hill last month, but it is the EU’s health commissioner and her vets who have the final decision and it is them who have to be convinced.
Equally wrong-headed is the decision of EU farm ministers to ban certain pesticides, fungicides and herbicides which are deemed as harmful. Deemed by whom? The decision is not backed up by science and UK farm minister, Hilary Benn, has the support of the UK’s Pesticides Safety Directorate in opposing the move.
But Benn has turned his back on science, and pandered to public opinion, in his incredulous decision to block a badger cull to halt the spread of TB which is devastating dairy herds in certain parts of England. He has gone against the advice of his own scientific advisers and ignored the experience of Ireland where a cull of infected badgers is proving effective with a significant drop in the number of TB reactors among cows. Meanwhile, 40,000 TB infected cows a year – and rising – will have to be culled. Where’s the animal welfare in that?
And Benn is clearly abdicating his responsibilities and risking a head-on collision with the industry with his dogmatic insistence on burdening the industry with a share of the cost of animal health measures – even if it is the Government’s fault, as was the case with the FMD outbreak last year
Even our own Scottish Government, with its close links to the rural sector, is not immune, and First Minister, Alex Salmond’s reassertion of his total opposition to GM crops at the Royal Highland Show, is flying in the face of reality.
The Government needs to look at the science again and rid itself of tired, worn-out arguments which no longer stand up to scientific scrutiny. Otherwise Scotland will be left way behind the rest of the world in the technology race.
It is a sad reflection on our society that farmers are being bombarded with so many new threats just as things were beginning to look better and the world is crying out for food.
However, it is clear that companies like Yara, whose profits from fertiliser for the six months to June 30 increased from £248 million to an obscene £715 million, are bent on exploiting their market dominance by greedily grabbing any extra margin which the farmer should be enjoying. C’est la vie!
©Edwin Gillanders: Editor, Farm North East
Editorial comment from Land-Care
The above article was written shortly before the collapse of the World Trade Doha talks on Tuesday July 29th. In the event it was the inability of China and of India to agree with the States over support for their farmers and tariffs that led to the recent collapse of the talks. Mandelson, as European Trade Commissioner, was indeed set to sell European farming down the river. He might have succeeded in spite of the efforts of President Sarkosy of France. No deal is better than a bad deal.
James Irvine
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