Rishi Sunak has said the nation’s food security is a “vital part” of national safety while addressing farmers today.
The Prime Minister reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to the sector at the National Farmers Union (NFU) conference in Birmingham where he announced funding for robotics, roof-top solar and agricultural research and helping farmers to increase productivity.
Mr Sunak said: “We’re strengthening support for your primary role to produce the nation’s food security as a vital part of our national security.
“And recent years have brought home the truth of that. Putin set off not just an energy price bomb, but a food price bomb too.
“You help support millions of jobs, add billions to our economy, shape the landscape.
“But most of all, you produce the food we need – food that is some of the best and highest quality anywhere in the world.
“And that’s why I say to all of you and to Britain’s farmers, just as I did, in my very first speech in Parliament: I’ve got your back.”
NFU’s president Minette Batters insisted farmers need to run profitable businesses and “don’t do it for the love of it”.
She said: “For too long, politicians have seen farming as a sort of cottage industry, and actually what the Prime Minister said today about ‘we know you do it for the love of it’. These are businesses, they don’t do it for the love of it.
“Yes, they love it otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it but they are businesses and we need to have profitable agriculture if we are to deliver on any of these legislative targets.”
Mr Sunak had suggested during a chat on stage with Ms Batters that farmers “don’t do it for the money” but because they feel a sense of responsibility and tradition.
This was the first speech by a Prime Minister to the NFU conference since Gordon Brown attended in 2008, ahead of an expected general election this year.
His appearance comes in the wake of polling which found Labour had narrowly overtaken the Tories among countryside voters, who also felt neither main party understood rural communities.
He told farmers the Government had changed its approach to trade deals to support the sector, was making sure there was fairness in the supply chain, and had a “massive, new and welcome focus on food security and food production”.
Ms Batters also called out Labour for a lack of farming trade policies shared publicly.
She outlined the challenges facing the sector, including extreme weather and flooding, soaring input costs because of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
She attacked the Welsh Government for its sustainable farming scheme, which would cut jobs, livestock numbers and farm incomes, warning the programme was a “red line, and we will not cross it”.
Food production was becoming a “poor relation”, Ms Batters warned, and said: “At the general election I’d like all parties committed to treating food security as the same strategic priority as energy security.”
Ms Batters also warned of an “ill-informed utopia where we live on lab-grown meat and gloop produced in factories”, which she described as a “joyless dystopian vision” that could never replace nutrient-rich food grown in the landscape.
