The report on the UK food industry (HERE) released in the last few days makes worrying reading. Food Brexit: A time to get real, is a joint effort by the University of Sussex, the University of London and the Sustainable Places Research Institute at Cardiff University. At 88 pages it is an authoritative work by serious people who understand the £200 billion a year food industry in this country.
It says Brexit will potentially have an enormous impact on the supply of food and identifies sixteen areas where the impact will be most felt. These include food sourcing and security, food safety standards, what will replace the CAP and the CFP, subsidies, the supply of labour and what the government's future vision of food supply in this country actually is.
The report's authors think we have all become complacent over the last forty years about the abundance of high quality cheap food and believe Brexit has the potential to fundamentally disrupt sourcing and supply chains as well as impacting on the amount we pay for basic foodstuffs. This is vital for a nation that cannot feed itself. We import 83% of fresh vegetables and 40% of fresh fruit, much of it from Europe. Of our major food commodities (cereals, beef, lamb, veal) 70% goes to Europe. Will the public be happy to pay more for British foods that help with environmental issues as well as delivering high quality? Are they prepared to accept lower quality (bent bananas!) food as a consequence of buying on world markets at cheaper prices?
What does the farming community want? How much is the government prepared to subsidise farmers? These are fundamental questions that have yet to be addressed.
As for fishing, the report raises questions about whether or not we have the fleet now to catch the fish we need. If we do not who will catch it for us? It also says our eating habits are different and fish is nowhere near as popular as it once was.
The decision to leave the 1964 London Fisheries Convention, announced suddenly by Michael Gove, was done without any background papers being written or any impact assessment made, although for Gove I assume this is what he wants post Brexit. Decisions made quickly, on the spur of the moment by non experts like him.
Owen Patterson is taken to task for suggesting we need to exit the CFP in order to exercise our right to fish up to our 200 mile limit. The report says we have always had this ability under the CFP and he is simply wrong. It is all a bit worrying. The paper harks back to the so called cod wars with Iceland.
There has been little or no thought given to something that threatens to impact our lives in all sorts of ways and given that Brexit is going to dominate political thinking for years it's hard to see how food and fishing policy is ever going to get the attention it deserves.
