Saturday 11 June 2022

Brexiteers or Greens annoy farmers the most?

For the Observer, it is obvious which factor to stress in an apparent loss of support for Tories in rural constituencies, of course:

Boris Johnson faces rural fury over post-Brexit food strategy

ambitious proposals to help farmers increase food production, first put forward last year by the government’s food tsar, Henry Dimbleby, had been “stripped to the bone” in a new policy document, 

but lower down , farmers were also facing:

pressure to prioritise the environment over food production, when the country needed to become more self-sufficient in food.

It might just be the usual delay and lack of clarity, with the Farmers' Union seeing a chance to turn the screw a bit with a bye-election coming up in a rural constituency, rendered as a more general story:

Farmers have become increasingly disenchanted, having been promised that their previous EU subsidies would replaced in full after Brexit. Instead they are being gradually phased out, with basic payments being cut by 20% this year. In addition they say the scheme intended to pay them for adopting green policies such as planting new trees and hedges and building new ponds (known as rewilding) remains vague and confusing.

In addition:

Henry Dimbleby was commissioned by the government to produce a review which would tackle the obesity crisis as well as the affordability of healthy food. He was also asked to show how this could be done in an environmentally friendly way.

But his ambitious recommendations, including expanding free school meals, a 30% reduction in meat and dairy consumption and giving strong protection to British farmers by not undermining them in trade deals with other countries, have not been adopted.

So it is quite likely that environmentalists and organic asparagus eating Tories are just as likely to annoy the farmers? That would be tricky to headline in the Observer, of course

 

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