23/6/2021

What’s the future for carbon and nature in farming with an Australian trade deal?

Written by Sue Evans, Director of GWCT Cymru

3 Minute Read

Sue Evans Aus

Sue Evans clearing scrub in Australia 1997 before moving on to work as a cow hand on Legune Station with 35,000 head of cattle

The biggest talk in town at present has been the Australian trade deal.  I have been reluctant for us (GWCT Wales) to get into this debate as trade is not within our Charitable Objectives.  But reading James Rebanks’ piece I find it hard not to put forward my tuppenny worth.  For years I’ve felt that Westminster aspires for the UK to be like my perception of Singapore – a big conurbation with the land used for the leisure of those who work in the city. 

I was told the other day that in the recent G7 summit agreement that the UK won’t have to add the carbon used to create the food it imports to its total carbon usage.  By this logic, the easiest way to reduce our carbon footprint would be to import all our food!  Then Alastair Leake has just confirmed that if he brought a contractor into Loddington to do all the cultivations and harvesting work the fuel used doesn’t have to be accounted for as it would go on the contractor’s carbon accounts!  What does that do to the rest of the world’s carbon footprint? Is this just an elaborate fudge to create the answers palatable to politicians to persuade our population that they are doing the right thing?

In the UK I often wonder why farmers continue with their endeavours to produce food. Yes of course there’s the question of what else would they do but with the feeling that the general public are so vocally against them why do they bother? In what other profession are people criticised for doing their job, but also expected to look after wildlife, carbon, water quality and much more?

Bethan William 's Farm

The country needs feeding, and we all know that this has got to be one of the most important provisions for life. The 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland shook our food supply chains and made the country think about what would happen if we couldn’t get the food into our shops.  But still our British farmers are often vilified for trying to produce food in a global market.  The beef and sheep farmers are constantly berated for their negative effect on global warming though, as I’ve said before, doesn’t that depend on how you measure the carbon? What else would we do with our mountains and Less Favoured Area land? 

The dairy farmers are vilified for their methods of hand rearing calves and potential pollution.  Then the arable farmers along with veg and fruit growers who potentially produce a product for a vegan market are vilified for the use of sprays and inorganic fertiliser.  Many of the farmers I speak with would love to farm in a less intensive way, but their income is dependent on a fiercely competitive world food market.  Farming in Wales is hard.  Even Jeremy Clarkson on his 1000 acres of Gloucestershire farm is beginning to understand the perils and pitfalls of farming.  Yet our farmers continue to try and eke out a living with everyone seemingly against them.

We could import the majority of our food from places around the world based solely on cheapest price in the supermarkets seemingly without caring about the effect on the wider global warming or the environment.  Australia is a very big country and you get all sorts of farming over there of all shapes and sizes so it’s not fair to say that it would all be produced to a lesser standard.  But even if all the food brought in from the Southern hemisphere had to comply with an equal amount of regulation and welfare standards to our UK farmers I do wonder, as with our imports of almonds from California – is it really carbon friendly to bring it in to the UK from the other side of the world rather than eating lamb off the mountains and hills of Wales, take it to a local slaughter house (now I’m fantasising – how many of them are left) and sell it to people on our doorstep?

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Comments

Hate the system, not the farmers

at 12:15 on 25/06/2021 by Matthew Hay

A good article, that gets into the meat of these issues. I think a lot of the frustration vented at farmers is unfair, but also misplaced. It is essentially people's unhappiness at the compromises a globalised food market forces us to make on animal welfare and environmental issues. These are not the fault of the farmer, whose hands are very often tied by the economics of the situations they find themselves in. The question of 'What else would we do with our mountains and Less Favoured Area land?' is an interesting one. Certainly production of lamb is an inefficient way to produce food, nor does it constitute a significant proportion of most people's diets. A lot of it is exported anyway. To my mind, low-intensity agro-ecological systems that produce a little lamb, or better still a little beef, while delivering greater levels of public goods (native upland woods, restored peat bogs, access for city-folk) are the way to go in these areas. Intensity is almost always the enemy of the environment and so public subsidies should allow farmers to lower the intensity of their production, while maintaining a viable business. This would also create the 'space' we need for our wildlife. The backdrop to all of this is a global conversation about meat consumption. There is no space, physically nor in terms of our remaining carbon budget, for the global population to consume as much red meat as we do in the UK. The environmental costs of meat production in other parts of the world need to factored in, so that its price, globally, rises sufficiently to disincentivise consumption everywhere.

Permanent pasture and peatlands our best carbon friends.

at 7:57 on 24/06/2021 by Alison Hiles

The carbon for imported food should not just include its production but its travel. This should all be discredited to Britain's 'Carbon Balance'. We need permanent pasture and hayfields for carbon storage but also habitat protection for the many wonderful species that have adapted themselves over generations to live in those habitats. Another important aspect is water storage -these soils and peats absorb rainfall and snow melt so that water trickles slowly into the rivers instead of rushing down them ,causing flooding. This is all over and above food production which is very much less carbon- intensive than arable food production which depends on intensive tractor use and chemical fertiliser. Not to mention the wonderful landscapes created which are appreciated by most people, even those who don't appear to notice that their activities and campaigning would inevitably destroy them.

Farming and the Australian trade deal.

at 7:38 on 24/06/2021 by Joanna Dakin

An excellent comment piece by Sue Evans which really sums up a lot of the despair farmers feel. Politicians make so many pledges which fall by the wayside at the first opportunity. My grandfather used to say that people only appreciate farmers when there is a crisis: remember the empty shelves in supermarkets at the beginning of Covid? Farmers were courted then for keeping the nation supplied.

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