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Agricultural Policy

That is excellent news. Let me leave it at that. I am glad that such rapid progress is now being made in the UK. It gives us a stronger negotiating position. It also gives us a stronger position with officials to examine the risk element. If we are to be fully compliant within a few days, we are in an even stronger position to say to the commissioner that we will now impose a UK ban. Lots of people want to speak, so I will deal briefly with CAP reform. First, let me with the CAP a happy birthday—its 50th anniversary is this year. For all the criticism that it always gets—sometimes quite rightly—over the past five decades it has, by and large, delivered price stability and given farmers the ability to invest, reinvest and be more productive. However, we know it is not fit for purpose, and that is what we are trying to deal with in this period of CAP reform. What must it deliver for us in Wales as well as the rest of the United Kingdom? Food security? Yes, but also affordability, because taxpayers want their money to be well used as well as affordable food prices on the shelf—the public benefits. The point has been well made that farmers have always been stewards of the environment. We now have a much more explicit statement of that, and it is no longer enough that they farm and look after the countryside. We need to measure, one way or another, how what we are doing affects biodiversity. My right hon. Friend the Member for Neath mentioned the public benefits of flood alleviation in the Plynlimon hills. Such benefits, and those of actions such as the reintroduction of Welsh whites, rather than Welsh blacks, on those hills, and the blocking of the drainage channels put in after world war two to allow those fields to be planted, need somehow to be measured effectively. Driving innovation, productivity and competitiveness in the medium to long term is right, but we do not want to lose the environmental benefits or damage the economics of farms by pushing too hard, too fast and causing people to fall of a cliff edge. Simplification is also important. In this context, I worry about the old adage, ““You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”” I worry about the bureaucracy and inertia of EU institutions, which sometimes do not act as radically as we would like. For a number of years, the UK has probably been at the leading edge of pushing for reform, but I am not sure that we will get the reform that we want or need for our farmers because of the difficulty of pulling 27 nations together in agreement. More than £350 million a year comes back into Wales through EU common agricultural funding. I welcome detailed involvement, as well as the presence, of Alun Davies—our man in Brussels, so to speak—and MEPs such as Derek Vaughan, who are fully involved in the agricultural agenda. They have played what Welsh Assembly Government Minister Alun Davies has described as a ““constructive role”” in shaping the UK’s position. I would like to flag up the transition from historical to flat-rate payments, which I mentioned earlier. That transition is a special issue for Wales, as it is for other devolved areas. On the protection and enhancement of existing stewardship and wider public benefits, one thing we must not do under the greening proposals in CAP reform is throw the baby out with the bathwater. We are and have been at the front edge of making environmental gains through the various stewardship schemes in Wales, England and elsewhere, for which we are sometimes criticised by farmers, but we are also at the front edge of delivering biodiversity and other wider public benefits. The greening proposals appear a little too rigid in places—the Commission is well aware of our concerns. We do not want to lose the benefits we have already gained, or make farmers, who are fully committed to environmental schemes, say, ““Well, this is too much for me.”” The idea of three-crop rotation, for example, might seem eminently sensible out in Brussels, but it seems ludicrous to say to some farmers, ““You have to do that on a regular basis in the way that we tell you.”” Such a Brussels micro-management approach looks like a re-emergence of the set-aside proposals for certain percentages of land, but we all know that the game has moved on so much. Green non-governmental organisations now recognise that often it is not about setting aside land, because that can be sterile land; what we need is good land and good innovations, including in intensively farmed areas, to ensure that we have wildlife, birdlife and biodiversity. I am a little worried by the prescriptive nature of some of the current CAP reform proposals, but I know that the Commission is minded to work through those proposals. Tenant farmers have already been mentioned. The active farmer proposals under the CAP reform are both interesting and a cause of concern. What about the farmer who diversified long ago—the farmer who runs a JCB off his land and does a bit of plant haulage, or who rents the cottage out the back to tourists and so on? What about the National Trust in Wales? Its prime activity is not farming, but it farms a hell of a lot. It is a membership-based organisation. Is it an active farmer? Again, I know the Commission is acutely aware of that and wants to it work through, because it recognises the good work the UK has done over the past couple of decades, but we have to ensure that it does. Coming back to simplification, we have to avoid the situation where farmers, agronomists and so on have to leap over hurdles to get back to their current starting point. Let us try to simplify before we get to the final CAP proposals. I have spoken for a long time and that is all I have say about CAP reform, although there are millions of things that I could go on about. I simply urge the Committee and Members of the House to keep a close eye on CAP reform as it goes through. Without a doubt the principles behind it are the right ones, but in practice, in a country such as Wales, where there are special conditions, and in the UK, where we have been at the leading edge of not only delivering good food and good produce to people’s tables, but achieving environmental gains and wider public benefits, we need to ensure that all that is preserved in the way that CAP reform goes through. We will then have done a good job. The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has a hard role ahead of him, but I am sure that the Secretary of State will ensure that the voices of Welsh farmers are put strongly to him at every twist and turn of the EU negotiations.