Thought for the week - 3 October 2006

What future for farming?

Earlier this year the Environment Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons invited views as to what farming should look like in 10 or 15 years time.

I offered them my vision for the future of farming and said that my hope for the future of the Common Agricultural Policy and European policy is that it will produce an agricultural industry that is not dependent on subsidy, but for which there is a level playing field worldwide and where the world's farmers get a fair return for their labour.

I would like to see an industry where:

• If stalls and tethers are banned in pig production in the UK, then pigmeat produced overseas using stalls and tethers is banned from our shops

• If minimum wage rates apply for producing food in the UK, then food from overseas should also pay the same minimums

• If foot and mouth is eradicated in the UK at horrendous cost to the UK industry and government, that overseas beef from countries with endemic foot and mouth should be banned

• Air freighted beans from Africa should meet the cost of the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere

• There is a level playing field between producers and purchasers and where the buying power is not in the hands of increasingly fewer retailers

• Supply chains are shortened and we can ensure safe and wholesome food through good relationships in a short chain, rather than endless paperwork in an increasingly long chain

• The world’s agricultural industry meets the world’s food needs. Farmers in the developed world are scratching to make a living. Farmers in the less developed world are also scratching to make a living. Yet 800 million people don’t have an adequate diet! That is an affront to God’s sense of justice (a view of God being concerned with justice is common to all the major faiths) and a sad indictment of the world’s political and economic system

At this harvest time let us have a vision for the future in which farmers worldwide have a fair return for their labour and in which the bounty of the world is shared.

And let us work to turn that vision into a reality. It will need more than the efforts of a Parliamentary select committee!

Revd Robert Barlow
Chaplain for Agriculture and Rural Life