The East of England Agricultural Society were delighted to be joined by guest speaker Tom Bradshaw for the 25th Shuttleworth Lecture.
Agricultural Society members, local farmers, agricultural professionals and college students congregated in the Lecture Theatre at Shuttleworth College to hear from Tom Bradshaw, President of the NFU who delivered a comprehensive overview of the current state of the agricultural industry, giving a balanced and honest view of the impact that policy and politics are having on the industry.
Tom was the 4th NFU President to address the Shuttleworth Lecture, and his chosen title for the evening was ‘Food Security in an Increasingly Insecure World.’
Quotes from the night-
On food security- If the world is this volatile, that we’ve got to reinvest in defence, why aren’t we taking the same measures around food security?
We’ve become ever more reliant over the last 20 years on imports from other parts of the world, and while we’re never going to be growing pineapples and bananas we’ve got a huge opportunity to produce more of what we can grow, but we need the investment and true returns to be able to drive that production for the future.
On Fertiliser tax- If we’re going to develop a sustainable marketplace here, that gives fair returns for the risk that is being invested into food production, we have to level the playing field.
I don’t have a problem with a carbon tax on fertiliser if all of the imports that are grown using fertiliser were subject to the same taxation. The unfairness of how they are applying the tax means we are going to be less competitive on the global market where they don’t care as much about carbon.
On our Food Standards- It’s about fair trade. Fair trade is very different to free trade, but at the moment we are faced with competing products coming in which have been produced to different standards than we produce to here, and they have the economic advantage.
If we’re happy to be eating food produced in that way, why aren’t we able to produce to those standards?
On Inheritance Tax- I don’t believe it’s a labour policy, it’s a treasury policy. In the end, they found a party who didn’t interrogate the policy enough. Labour were offered £500million, they sat there, looked at it and they thought ‘we’ll take the £500 million’
On IHT campaigning– There is going to be a time where it appears its all gone quiet, but it’s not. You can’t keep sprinting when what we’re facing is a marathon, the target now is the finance bill and October Budget.
On SFI- The government will have known in October that significant alternations would have needed to be made to SFI, the initial demand was too high, if they’d said initially they were going to cap applications to 75% of your BPS at the start, the money would have gone much further, they could have stopped new applicants in January to work through the 3000 open agreements in the system to get a better picture of the budget. Instead its been an absolute abomination. The contempt they have treated people’s business with is simply unbelievable.
On Planning- The planning and infrastructure bill is something that is absolutely needed. Planning at the moment is blocking, rather than enabling policy.
For example, trying to line up Capital grant schemes with Defra grant windows, planning permission and Environment Agency licences is very complicated.
If we can get to the point where the planning system actually works to enable the update of infrastructure, we’ll be in a better place.
On the future– 70 million consumers living on an island is a great opportunity for UK agriculture in the long term. 70 million reasonably wealthy consumers when you look at the global picture.
All climate change modelling shows the UK will continue to be in a really good place to produce food, compared with some of the countries from which we are relying on for imports at the moment. Which provides a genuine opportunity both for the domestic market and for markets that really value credibility and provenance around the world.
Many thanks to EEAS member Andrew Davies for chairing the evening and to Shuttleworth College for the use of their lecture theatre for the event.
