Gloucestershire AGM Chairman's Report
Gloucestershire Branch Chairman Thomas Jenner-Fust delivers his Chairman's Report ahead of the 2024 AGM
In the words of the Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”, and over the last few years we certainly have. My brief tenure as Chairman of the Gloucestershire branch has been eventful to say the least, with headlines dominated by Brexit, Covid, climate change and the cost-of-living crisis.
In my opinion a much greater threat than all of these to our interests is the failure of government to decide what they want from the agricultural sector and to facilitate a post Brexit transition to a new way of doing things that supports farmers and rural business.
There are those among the public and the press who resented the subsidies that farmers received under the CAP without understanding that these subsidies kept their food supply stable and affordable. The new direction of travel that has emerged (slowly and painfully) will pay farmers and land managers not to produce food at all but instead encourage them to focus on the delightfully vague provision of ‘public goods’.
This comes at a time when there is a huge increase in demand for agricultural land for other uses. These include house building but increasingly we see large areas of land going under solar panels, tree planting schemes and carbon offsetting projects. Some landowners have taken land out of traditional agriculture in order to focus on rewilding projects that have a high value food production niche such as ‘wild’ meat but which are not part of the mainstream supply chain.
Faced as we are with an ever-increasing population, harvests under threat from changing weather patterns and worldwide geopolitical instability the idea that we can always import cheap food from ‘somewhere else’ is becoming less and less of a safe bet.
I firmly believe not only that food prices will continue to increase but also that some foods that we have become accustomed to seeing in the shops will become harder to come by and there may come a point where we experience food shortages.
We now find ourselves in the ‘honeymoon period’ of a Labour government. I know the CLA were working hard to make our case well in advance of the election and will continue to do so.
Although many landowners and rural businesses will have concerns about a government that is not traditionally aligned to our interests, we must remain hopeful that some stability has been ushered in by the size of their win and that this will provide businesses and consumers with some respite from the chaos of the last few years.
Putting this note of optimism to one side I am convinced that our politicians (of whatever hue) are so divorced from the countryside that the farming and land-based sector will always be near the bottom of their agenda.
My last report noted that the ‘Levelling Up’ white paper almost entirely ignored the countryside despite clear evidence that, if it were treated as an entity in itself, it lags behind the rest of the country in multiple areas. Similarly, the Labour party’s 131- page manifesto managed just 87 words on farming. This means that the work of the CLA is more important than ever.
The CLA is our voice in the political arena and continues to make a strong, evidence-based case for the rural economy on behalf of its members. I only hope that the new government listen to the expert and considered views put forward by the CLA and that they will choose to work with us rather than against us to collectively face the challenges ahead.