by Vicki Hird MSc
This contribution explores the opportunity created by the transition from CAP to a post-Brexit agricultural policy with specific reference to the Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes in England and the need to put emissions reduction in the whole of the UK at the heart of future plans for farming, land management and the supply chain.
One significant, possibly positive, but as yet unmeasurable, impact of Brexit was the opportunity for the four devolved nations to decide for themselves how to support farmers, make better use of the land, and regulate farming. The Agriculture Act 2020 has been several years in the making and, with considerable lobbying, has been written to provide a useful framework for the UK.
The Act moves from a support mechanism for farmers via the EU Common Agricultural Policy of around £3.2bn per year to one based on payments mainly for delivering public goods such as protected nature, critical climate mitigation, public access and clean water. The evidence is pretty clear that this policy shift must drive more agroecological, regenerative farming and nature-based solutions for climate on all farmed land, with diversity at its heart.
If the schemes, budgets and wider policy that flow from this legislation are designed well, it could be an amazing example of ‘policy fit for purpose’, delivering climate and biodiversity impact whilst also ensuring a healthy food supply. As these new schemes will be rolled out while the key farm income support (the basic payment scheme – BPS) is being wound down over 7 years, it is crucial that they work well as the majority of farmers rely on BPS to support farm viability and supplement farm incomes.
England has made the most progress in establishing a post-Brexit agricultural subsidy regime (see details of ELM scheme in section 4.8 above). As indicated above, the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are engaged similarly in designing their new support regimes but with more emphasis on basic farm support.
Ideally all new schemes must provide payments for activities, capital grants, advice and a strong regulatory baseline to ensure farmers can survive and deliver vital public goods.
These should include, really for the first time, climate action through building carbon stores in soil and trees and reducing emissions from fertiliser use and soil disturbance for instance. Schemes need to align well enough to not disadvantage a particular sector or group of farmers across the UK, and to minimise the administrative and compliance burden in cross-border regions.
There has been an impressive level of testing and on farm trialling of possible scheme designs. Farmer pilots of the England Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) are testing the various elements of the design. These include the payment methodology, land management plans and the 8 pilot standards (covering arable and horticultural land and soils, improved grassland and soils, low and no input grassland, hedgerows, on farm woodland, and waterbody buffering).
There is a push for new standards to support whole-farm agroecological systems, i.e. those that work with nature to deliver positive outcomes such as agroforestry, agro-diversity (in crops and livestock), and better coverage for horticulture, small scale/peri-urban farming.
A wider Agricultural Transition Plan (ATP) is providing a larger set of tools, from farmer-led research and productivity grants to animal health and welfare pathways, new entrants and farmer exit schemes. But there remains a major publicly funded advisory scheme gap – something all the trials have indicated is vital as many of the requirements, such as those on climate, are new to farmers.
For all this to work, the farming industry requires a budget that is multiannual and which fits the significant scale of need including the reversal of the decline in the state of nature on farmland; a halt to the continued harm to watercourses; and actions to tackle the 10% of UK GHG emissions from farming. Critically there is a need for wider policy shifts to ensure the market supports the transition to climate and biodiversity-based farming.
Without restructuring the retail supply chain – which is deeply unbalanced, with a handful of dominant buyers – the public good schemes will fail. The 2020 Agricultural Act contains useful new powers to deliver more transparency and fairness in the supply chain after considerable lobbying. Such measures could help farmers to gain a better deal and more value via new, enforced statutory codes of practice for the supply chain.
There is as yet no timetable for implementation and there is insufficient action to diversify the retail sector. Nor is there much evidence of intent to provide regional and local infrastructure (such as for abattoirs, processing, milling and storage) to build better routes to market for farmers who wish to use more rotations and diversify their businesses in order to maintain a regenerative system.
And there are not yet the regulations underpinning all this to ensure basic nature and climate protections are secured via a new and long-overdue Environment Act 2021. This should ideally have been developed in tandem with the 2020 Agriculture Bill.
Trade deals are also a huge part of the shaky ground on which the UK is building a new post-Brexit food system. The global market is a poor replacement for the EU market on our doorstep. New trade deals should be about a race to the top on animal welfare, environment and public health (antibiotics, pesticide residue).
For those struggling to afford good food, policies should target incomes via wages, house prices and welfare support mechanisms, rather than make food ever cheaper in a ‘race to the bottom’ on standards via imports which the public don’t want.
UK farmers see major issues in competing with imports at lower standards and this would undermine the capacity of the new farm schemes to deliver.
Other challenges created by Brexit include labour shortages, with over 3.9 million employed in the UK food industry (which is worth £113bn to the economy), where a significant part of that workforce is or was from EU countries. Policies are needed to ensure that the food and farming sectors can invest in better wages and conditions to attract and train more UK workers. Such policies are not attractive to cheap food advocates or global traders, so political will is needed.
As a positive, there is a welcome legislative push to drive action and budgets in ways that should help farmers and the planet. However, safety nets and knowledge transfer schemes are needed along the way as the new schemes are rolled out to avoid bankruptcies, farm amalgamations, job losses and environmental damage as a result of intensification and ever larger field sizes.
With the longer-term risks of major climate change, extreme weather and land use impacts affecting food supplies both in the UK and abroad, it will be crucial for the Agricultural Transition Plan and other wider policies to build in resilience and adaptation, hard, into our food and farming systems.