Cherish our farms, dont tie them in red tape

By Charlie Brooks Published: 6:39AM GMT 19 Feb 2010

Comments 16 |

Hilary Benn"s legislation shows that he doesn"t trust farmers Photo: PA

By the end of the next decade, this country will have a shortage of 60,000 skilled workers in the food production sector. If the unemployment figures released on Wednesday are anything to go by, there will also be millions of people without a job, especially the young. So what is going wrong?

At the launch last week of a new strategy from the "Agriskills Forum", aimed at equipping the industry with the right skills for the 21st century, farmers expressed their frustration that careers officers have a poor impression of their work. They feel the public considers farming to be an unskilled trade which is quite ironic, because these days it"s more about being a biologist, a marketeer and a computer geek than a Worzel Gummidge clone.

Countryside ban for children because mums cannot read maps and hate mud Property in Spain: Castles in the sand Why we will all have to foot the bill for summer Swarm of millions of ladybirds infests farm Country Diary: Robin Page on The Royal Show Red tape forces cancellation of village fetes

While the farming industry may well lose out to nanotechnology when it comes to recruitment, it is also missing the point with the general public. What they are increasingly interested in are the ethics of how food is produced, rather than the IQ of the farmer. Engaging more with schools, rather than festooning workers with certificates of achievement, might yield greater rewards.

Yet the most revealing explanation for the shortage of agricultural labour came from the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Hilary Benn. At last week"s launch, he admitted that for his first year or more in office, he sat back and wondered why no one came to him and asked about developing skills in agriculture.

The answer was quite simple. It was abundantly clear to the agricultural community that he wasn"t remotely interested in food production. It was only too aware that his priority apart from wittering on about the evils of hunting, which he"s been doing again this week was creating jobs in environmental quangos (there are 67 under his department). And it is hardly surprising that farmers are having a crisis of confidence when you consider measures such as Mr Benn"s draft Animal Health Bill, which will allow the Treasury to set any tax it cares to dream up, through a separate Finance Bill, on every farm animal in the country. Horses, you can be sure, will be charged a disproportionate amount compared to the threat to animal health that they pose. Not many horses vote Labour.

What the Animal Health Bill spells out is that this Government doesn"t trust farmers. It wants to impose yet another bureaucratic body to tie them up in red tape, while distancing itself from responsibility. As it has very successfully done with the shambolic Rural Payments Agency, which has squandered hundreds of millions of pounds but shields the Government from accountability. The only jobs this new body (quango number 68) will create are in pen-pushing the only type this Government seems able to produce.

So it was nauseating to listen to Mr Benn unctuously telling farming leaders that they are the biggest manufacturing industry in the UK. When he was handed his job, his brief from the PM was clearly not: "Hilary, we love farmers. Increasing food production and developing agricultural skills are a priority." What he might have said is: "Benn, we"ve had foot and mouth and BSE. We don"t want anything else. Now go away."

With sterling significantly weaker than it was, it has finally dawned on the Secretary of State that imported food won"t necessarily be cheap food in the future. So, way after the horse has bolted, he is slamming the stable door. "We will need all the means at our disposal [to produce food]," he belatedly predicted as he signed off at the skills strategy launch. "And I mean all of them."

"That," I suggested to one of his aides, "sounded like a resounding endorsement of GM crops."

"That"s a ridiculous inference to make," she snapped. Whoops.