Agriculture

Part of Opposition Day – in the House of Commons at 5:47 pm on 14 February 1991.

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Photo of Mr David Nicholson Mr David Nicholson , Taunton 5:47, 14 February 1991

I assure the hon. Member for Angus, East (Mr. Welsh) that I appreciate the way in which the farmers of Scotland have suffered in recent weeks because of the weather conditions. My farmers on Exmoor and the Brendon hills have been coping with snow up to 1½ ft deep.

The considerable difficulties which farmers in Somerset and the west country face were summed up in the Somerset Farmer, reporting Professor John Webster of Bristol University as having told the NFU county annual meeting in Taunton a few weeks ago: We are no longer lovable in the eyes of the consumer, and we are poor as well. To be rich and unloved would be bearable. To be poor but lovable would not be so bad. But to be both poor and unloved, as we are, smacks, as Oscar Wilde put it, of carelessness. Despite that plight, we can boast certain success stories. We have the success of Liscombe research, launched by the Minister in another place about two years ago. That is happening on Exmoor. Also, increased interest is being shown by the farming community in Somerset and the west country in marketing their produce, summed up in Somerset Farmer for February of this year as follows: Quality not quantity should be the aim if farmers are to regain both their popularity and profit over the years ahead. I hope that the Ministry will continue to support in every way possible Taste of Somerset, which helps to market the foodstuffs that we produce. I commend greatly our excellent Somerset brie, which is equally as good, probably better, than the French product, and while my constituency is well known for Taunton cider, produced by the very successful company of that name, the real cognoscenti, when it is not Lent, partake of Sheppy's farmhouse cider, and I am delighted to see on the Government Front Bench my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) who visited Sheppy's about this time last year. I cannot remember whether it was Lent.

I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucestershire, West (Mr. Marland) referred to the need to check on unhealthy imported eggs. On 31 January, as reported in column 615 of Hansard, I received an excellent written answer from the Under-Secretary of State for Health in which he listed all the dates on which infected imported eggs had been found, with the countries of origin. I regret to say that the country of origin was usually Holland. I hope that that problem will be tackled.

Having heard much in recent years of NFU criticism of Her Majesty's Government, I am delighted to quote from a resolution that was passed on 28 January by the Somerset and South Avon county branch of the NFU which, unlike the Liberal party and the hon. Member for Ceredigion and Pembroke, North (Mr. Howell), was unequivocal in its view of the MacSharry proposals. It said that it condemns commissioner MacSharry's proposals for reform of the CAP as being deeply damaging and discriminatory against United Kingdom agriculture as a whole and against full-time family farms in the United Kingdom in particular. The Minister will be encouraged by the next part of the resolution, which fully supports the Minister of Agriculture in his opposition to the proposals, calls for the package to be scrapped and insists that the EC Agriculture Commissioner goes back to the drawing board and produces proposals which address the problem of rising support costs and falling farm incomes without damaging the interests of any particular group of farmers or any particular EC Member State. The county branch estimated that, for a dairy producer with 85 cows, which is not a large herd, returns under the MacSharry proposals would be down by nearly 20 per cent. The Department has produced similar examples.

We congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister on his firm commitment to the farming community and the wider interest of the nation, the countryside and food production that he has shown in recent months. At Bournemouth last year, he said: If farmers cannot earn a living then they cannot look after the land. He said much the same in his speech to the NFU conference in London. He set out the issues clearly. He exposed the ghastly term "modulation," which sounds like an expression used in music teaching—I suppose that we are being made to suffer an Irish music lesson—and the extraordinary proposals there.

I am glad that the Minister mentioned in his speech to the NFU conference what appears to be a tobacco scandal. Apparently, nearly £1 billion is going into subsidising the production of quite low-grade tobacco, which I believe is exported to third world countries and does immense harm to the health of the people there. I have received letters from my constituents on the subject. I hope that the responsible Departments, whether the Department of Trade and Industry or the Department of Health, will tackle this matter.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his announcement this week of a 14 per cent. increase in the hill livestock compensatory amounts, which will be welcome to my hard-pressed sheep producers, and in responding on Tuesday to the interests of young farmers in producing his tenancy proposals.

I am constantly reminded by farmers in my constituency that we must have a policy to replace the generation of farmers approaching retirement. The statistics show that many farmers now in work are relatively old and are approaching retirement, and it is difficult to know who will replace them, as so many sons of existing farmers are not interested in taking on even family farms. I hope that the tenancy proposals will help with that state of affairs.

At the same time, I warn Ministers of the danger of encouraging farmers or intended farmers to get into debt. I make no apology for raising this matter, which I raised earlier with the Prime Minister—the contribution of the banks and other lending institutions to business indebtedness in recent years. I have particularly in mind the effects on farmers, because an important factor that reduces the overall net incomes of British farmers, who are larger-scale and more efficient than continental farmers, is the indebtedness into which they have got in recent years. I welcome the Prime Minister's sympathetic comments on that matter.

I again press the Minister to bring forward as soon as possible more comprehensive and co-ordinated schemes to help the environment and countryside. We have many small schemes which are excellent—including environmentally sensitive areas, less-favoured areas, the farm woodlands scheme and so on—but the farming and environmental community want more co-ordination between the various schemes.

In that respect, my hon. Friends the Members for Tiverton (Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop) and for Honiton (Sir P. Emery) and I supported the giving of LFA status to parts of the Blackdown hills in our constituencies. The Department took proposals to that effect to Brussels, and, although they were good proposals which encompassed the parishes on the Blackdown hills in my constituency, they were turned down on what we thought were spurious statistics.

There is now a proposal from the Countryside Commission to give the area outstanding natural beauty status. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and I support that, but emphasise that it must be accompanied by environmentally sensitive area status, which includes grants and produces incomes for the farmers involved. We must have co-ordination between the various schemes, and I hope that the Ministry of Agriculture and the Department of the Environment will work together to achieve that.

I shall not spend time today on the proposals of the Liberals, much though I respect the hon. Member for Ceredigion and Pembroke, North, because he and his hon. Friends will get nowhere near governing this country. But some of our farming constituents might be considering the prospect of a Labour Government.

On that basis, it is worth while reminding them of two comments made by Labour's senior agriculture spokesman, the hon. Member for South Shields (Dr. Clarke). He is not in his place for the debate, and I note that the Labour party is rather diminished in its Back-Bench support. In Farming News of 1 June 1990, he was reported as having said about agriculture: We have no strategy and we won't have until the general election. I hope that farmers will see through that. At a recent Question Time in which I participated, he asked: Is the Minister not aware that it simply does not make sense to throw good money after bad to subsidise farmers?"—[Official Report, 29 November 1990; Vol. 181, col. 998.] Farmers will remember that as we approach the next general election. They will see through the Labour party's blandishments in trying to coax support front the countryside.