Sutton St James farmer Tony Gent hits out at 'totally irresponsible' Government policies

In this week's Word on the Ground column, Tony Gent hits out at Brexit and what he sees as 'totally irresponsible' Government policies...

As I write it’s snowing heavily as farmers look for some fine spring sowing weather this again looks like a topsy-turvy season. What we cannot get to grips with is topsy-turvy confusing, misleading, self-indulging politics.

On the one hand government rhetoric is to encourage more home food production, but every policy it implements is instilled in the opposite.

During the past months food supply disruption and shortages has become very real and we all have seen this from eggs to now tomatoes, these are just two items to the extreme of this.

Our industry and its leaders take no pleasure in being proved so right when with the implication of Brexit, saying we will see shortages and we told you this would happen.

With Brexit our hands were tied behind our backs with the sudden loss of labour resources we had - and had been benefiting from - for many years, ensuring that crops could be harvested and supplied to our home markets, preventing the need for imports and contribute to the country’s wealth.

It’s obvious if you don’t have the labour, you don’t plant the crop, so that’s what’s happening, and supply stops.

Food production for 45 years in the European Union has benefited from support. Producing food mainly due to weather and the extremes of markets is a very risky undertaking.

Responsible government has a duty to provide a stable food production to its citizens and protect business from these extremes. This support has been tremendously successful in the EU ensuring relatively stable food supply.

This is a situation that our present government seems to have completely abandoned. We were promised that the same total amount of money would be paid to the industry. But the problem is that the money is rapidly moving from production support to environment, which in itself is great. The problem though is twofold, that money only covers extra environmental costs or contributes for lack of production. The result is that this money is taken away from supporting production at a time when costs are rising so rapidly and more home production is needed, not less as we are seeing.

So many farmers are planning to reduce or completely cease production. We don’t run our businesses as a charity and to operate we at least must have reasonable resources and a fiscal environment in place or there is just no point in committing ourselves to an unworkable situation.

Brexit has also put in place a complex trading system that caused masses of paperwork and more expense resulting in much less haulage resources and a reluctance of companies to trade with the UK. Which has resulted in situations like we have recently seen with tomatoes where when there is supply issues and there is hassle and cost resulting from our self-imposed difficulties, we are going to be the first country to have supplies cut.

This situation amounts to totally irresponsible Government and we are seeing the consequences of this so clearly now.