Speech to Swale NFU Group

Last night I was privilaged to be the guest speaker at the AGM of our local branch of the National Farmers Union. My speech sums up the commitment I have to this vital industry, it reads...

Good evening and thank you for inviting me to your Annual General Meeting.

Let me begin by making clear my own commitment to the British farming industry and our rural communities. I believe that a healthy agriculture sector is fundamental to the long term well being of our nation.

Unfortunately, successive governments have downgraded the importance of home grown food and taken the short sighted view that it doesn’t matter where produce comes from as long as the supply chain is not broken.

In an increasingly unstable world, where natural resources, including water, will become scarcer, I believe the next government, of whatever political persuasion, will have to develop a strategic national plan to secure our supply of food.

Any plan must be based on maximising home grown output and that can only be done by rewarding farmers not penalising them, by protecting farmers from unfair foreign imports and by reducing the amount of unnecessary red tape that takes up so much valuable time.

Above all Government must recognise the importance of agriculture to our country and one way it could do that would be to change the name of the ministry charged with overseeing the industry. For instance, perhaps DEFRA, could be renamed the Department of Agriculture and the Rural Environment, the acronym for which would be DARE.

Dare to stand up for our farmers. Dare to stand up for our rural communities. Dare to stand up for our environment.

I can assure you here and now that a Conservative Government will Dare to be very supportive of your industry, but so parlous is the state of public finances that David Cameron and George Osborne are unlikely to be able to make any spending commitments to you that the country cannot afford.

However, there are things that a future Conservative Government can do to help within the existing budgets.

Take competition. In a truly open market farmers must be allowed to compete fairly, which is why we support the Competition Commission’s proposal for a strong, proportionate and enforceable grocery supply code of practice that works in the interests of both consumers and producers.

Then there is research and development. It can surely be no co-incidence that there has been a slow down in the growth of yields during a time when spending on research and development has been cut. We recognise that R&D will have an increasingly important role to play if we are to produce more food while impacting less on our environment, which is why a Conservative Government will give a higher priority to R&D within existing budgets.

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