THE Government needs to do more to support farmers and prevent a Winter food crisis, experts have warned.
Speaking to GB News, Michael Oakes, the chair of the NFU’s Dairy Board, said: “There’s a lack of confidence we saw throughout this summer where the costs far overtake our returns. And actually, we’re back on a tightrope again, potentially going into the next Summer with the high cost of this winter.
“We could see production drop again, and that’s been mirrored in the farming sector and the horticultural sector. There’s a real lack of confidence and I think the government needs to understand the long-term implications of businesses actually shrinking and dropping. It’s not just going to come back overnight. We need the Government in effect to declare exceptional market conditions and actually work with the industry and work with the NFU to put companies back into the industry to make sure that British produce is available on consumers’ plates.
“We are in regular dialogue with the Government, we’ve seen massive churn within Defra recently and civil servants and ministers changing. Mark Spencer, the farming minister, has a background in farming, and we hope the Government will actually sit down and listen. But there’s still a real lack of confidence within lots of sectors.”
His concerns were echoed by farmer Andrew Ward.
He told GB News: “The biggest problem we’ve got is that the Government and DEFRA are more concerned with birds and trees and the environment than they are producing food. And whenever you say anything to Defra they say: ‘Look, we’re heading down a road, where we’re going to be having to import more food rather than grow our own homegrown food’, so don’t worry. They say it’s not a problem at all.
“Fertiliser prices have gone up around 300% in the last couple of years, and a lot of fertiliser has come from Russia and Ukraine. But the problem we’ve got with that is that there are two fertilizer factories in this country – which are mothballed. The Government doesn’t seem to want to do anything about it, so we’ve got a fertilizer shortage. This is why we’re looking at our cost of production going up.”
