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Mr Paice receives a battering – but dairy farmers line up bigger targets in August

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Wednesday’s unprecedented coming together of dairy farmers in London was notable on a number of levels.

The sheer volume of farmers and supporters from the allied industries – nearly 3,000 united in anger and a desire to force real change – crammed into Westminster’s imposing Methodist Central Hall made for an electric atmosphere.

There was the coming together of UK farming organisations and with simple, clear messages. Enough is enough. Farmers are here in their masses because they can take no more. ‘We’ – all of us – will be out in force in protest August, unless things change rapidly.

And then there was the car crash that was Farming Minister Jim Paice’s appearance.

Over the years, Labour Ministers routinely received a (metaphorical) battering at the hands of angry farmers. But Mr Paice, a farmer by background and at heart, has grown used to being the farmer’s friend during his years in Opposition and – for the most part – in Government.

Which is why Wednesday must have felt like a hammer blow for the Minister, who has just suffered his worst week in office.

The event had begun in barnstorming fashion. NFU deputy president Meurig Raymond, standing for Peter Kendall, stranded at a French airport, earned a raucous ovation for a passionately delivered speech ending with the call to ‘back our dairy farmers’.

Farmers For Action’s David Handley, the ultimate crowd-pleaser – farming’s Mick Jagger but without the wrinkles – topped it with a speech of raw passion, aggression and humour ending with a call to action. ‘Cancel your holidays in August,’ he pleaded. No excuses. Everyone knew what he meant.

Mr Paice started on the back foot when his turn came. He was greeted with a mixture boos and applause. “I don’t mind being booed but wait until I have finished something,” he responded, little realising how his words would come to haunt him.

He had already had a bad day in Tuesday, after admitting in a radio interview that he didn’t know the price of a pint of milk, as ‘my wife does the shopping’, a gaffe had generated glee and ridicule.

But he handled the situation superbly, holding up a pint of milk ‘I know that this costs, 49p’, followed by a bottle of water, ‘I also know that THIS cost, 53p. I know which is better value-for-money. I know which cost far more to produce. I know which is more nutritious and which is more important to the UK economy.”

Big applause. Back on track.

And he continued to make a decent enough impression, empathising with farmers, criticising the failings of the supply chain and outlining what the Government was doing to help, including new helpful announcements on nitrate regulations and progress on a voluntary code of practice to bring about a fairer deal for farmers. He sought to stress the limits of what politicians can do. “Governments can’t fix prices,” he said.

Fair enough. But then it all went wrong.

“And it involves all of you, too.” Silence. “Are you sure you are doing all you can do reduce your production costs?” Angry murmur from audience, rapidly turning into loud boos. Some heckled loudly.

Mr Paice stopped in his tracks, the surprise etched over his face captured in our video round up of the event. “You see how easy it is to lose friends,” he said. Nobody laughed.

From that moment, the mood of the entire event had turned.

It became a cycle of farmers standing up to berate Mr Paice, rather than the processors and supermarkets that are paying them so little, and the Minister trying, in vain, to dig himself out of the hole. The rest of the panel of industry leaders was effectively bypassed.

As the heckling grew louder, Mr Paice initially tried to meet fire with fire. “If you think shouting me down is going to help you, forget it.”

He asked farmers why they had allowed themselves to be pushed around by the rest of the food chain, a reference to the lack of collaboration among UK dairy farmers. The farmers did not like it one little bit.

“I used to think Jim Paice was quiet sensible, until I heard him today,” came a barb from Cornwall.

“How do you want to be remembered Mr Paice? As the doctor who put things right or the undertaker?” asked another from the floor.

There were many more like it.

As his mood visibly darkened, Mr Paice told the audience he was the best friend they had in Parliament. The irony is, he was probably right.

And then came the killer blow as a member of the audience – I didn’t catch her name – accused Mr Paice of ‘patronising farmers’, the very farmers who so readily vote Conservative.

Mr Paice finally stepped back, apologising if he had offended or patronised them and insisting that had not been his intention.

But it was too late. He had lost his audience.

His misjudgement was not to question whether farmers, themselves – along with processors, supermarkets, law makers and trade organisations – could do more to help themselves.

It was to do it in that way, in that venue and in front of that audience. A battered audience on the edge and on its knees. An audience that didn’t want friends, advice or rhetoric. They wanted help and more money for their milk.

It was never going to be easy but Mr Paice did not need to make it so hard. He is a strong politician and will recover to fight better days.

The real pity was that the battle of ‘One Minister versus 3,000 dairy farmers’ ultimately deflated some – but by no means all – of the hugely positive energy generated by the event.

But the direction has been set and that is all likely to change in the next few weeks as the industry sets aside August in this wet, miserable Olympic summer to target – with one voice and one goal – the real source of their fury.

As Dave Handley said afterwards: “There’s an awful lot of people in the retail and processing industry who should be very, very worried.”

Government not playing fair with CAP reform

‘Fairness for taxpayers, fairness for the environment and fairness for farmers,’ has been the mantra of Westminster Ministers as they outline the UK Government’s stance on CAP reform.

So who have they been trying to kid?

Very few UK farmers will see any fairness in the Government’s plans to cut their direct payments by 20 per cent to fund rural development measures when elsewhere in Europe that money will go straight into farmers’ pockets.

It is one thing to argue for CAP funding to be gradually shifted away from direct payments towards rural development, as UK Ministers have been doing for some time.

But it is another entirely to do it unilaterally in a way that will blatantly disadvantage your own farmers, not to mention fly in the face of Defra utterances to support productive farming.

Yet this is precisely what the UK Government is asking for the power to do, as talks on CAP reform become more meaningful.

So what is going on?

There appear to be two drivers behind the UK’s requests for the flexibility to move as much as a fifth of direct payment money across to rural development – flexibility few, if any, other member states will take up (in fact a number are looking to move funds the other to boost direct payments).

 One is the long-held philosophical view within HM Treasury that Single Payments are somehow ‘dead money’ that line the pockets of aristocratic landowners and ‘slipper farmers’, yielding no benefit to the taxpayer. Agri-environment schemes and other rural development measures are simply ‘better targeted at public goods’, is the official Government line on this.

The other driver is cash flow. The UK has always had an historically low share of EU rural development funds.  Under current allocations, there would simply not be enough cash in the pot to fund the UK’s, and particularly England’s, ambitious agri-environment scheme plans over the next decade or so.

The flexibility sought by the UK would conveniently allow these schemes to be funded by slashing direct payments to farmers, rather than continuing the current expensive Treasury match funding of ‘modulated’ money. A neat solution in the Age of Austerity.

 But surely, as the UK farming unions point out, the answer should be to fight harder for a fairer – to taxpayers, the environment and farmers – share of the rural development pot in ongoing EU budget negotiations.

Because the biggest concern in all of this would be if the UK’s request was a signal it has effectively given up on getting a fairer deal on rural development from Brussels.

That would simply be unfair on everybody.

Learning IT…slowly

AS ONE Defra agency appears to be finally learning the painful lessons of IT rollouts gone wrong, another seems to have walked into the same trap.

Defra and the Rural Payments Agency infamously pressed the ‘go’ button on the agency’s creaking IT system in February 2006 hoping to launch thousands of SPS 2005 payments before the system was ready or had even been properly tested. The rest is history – as ex-Defra Permanent Secretary Dame Helen Ghosh put it so eloquently, the payments simply ‘gummed up’ the system which could not cope.

RPA has been dealing with the fallout ever since and now, six years on, appears to be reaching something approaching stability.

SPS 2011 payments, although there are still problems, are flowing more easily than ever before and communications – a massive failure in the early crisis-ridden days of SPS – are improving both internally and to farmers (or ‘customers’ as RPA still insists on calling them).

There is, unlike before, now ‘a plan’, as RPA boss Mark Grimshaw likes to say. The agency’s efforts to address its deep-rooted problems and to prepare properly for the massive challenge of CAP reform will be laid out in its soon-to-be-published five-year plan.

One lesson clearly learned is that never again will a system be launched without having been fully tested and shown to work.

Meanwhile, AHVLA is having its own problems with an IT roll out that has effectively ‘gummed up’.

The £12m project is, on one level, small fry compared with the scale of the RPA fiasco or other Government IT flops like the £12bn NHS waste of taxpayer money.

But it is having an impact on the control of bTB, from bureaucratic frustration at farm and vet level to delays in collection of reactors and the collation of data, at a time when the fight against the disease is being ratcheted up a level.

It raises a number of questions.

Why were the problems now being experienced with ‘Release 6’not picked up before it was rolled out? When will they be fixed? And at what cost?

Have Defra/AHVLA been as transparent with vets and farmers as they could have been?

All of this will no doubt be answered in the independent review commissioned into the problem by AHVLA. Farmers and vets will await the outcome with interest.

Knowledge will be the key to fighting Schmallenberg

By Farmers Guardian livestock editor Katie Lomas.

With news of the ‘novel’ Schmallenberg virus being detected in the UK this week livestock farmers may well be asking themselves ‘what next?’

Perhaps the most worrying thing about this disease though is the apparent lack of knowledge about how it spreads and exactly how we test for it.

Experts have already freely admitted they know little about the disease; there is no blood test for it and very little evidence they can use to estimate how far and wide its consequences will spread.

Even more disturbing is the idea the disease could have been circulating in England since last year, if the reports of transmission via midges are confirmed.

With many sheep farmers about to enter their busiest time of the year with the onset of lambing the added worry of the disease is definitely something most could do without.

This seemingly ‘silent’ disease may well have been brought into the country via live imports, which once again opens up a new line of debate on that issue.

Experts have warned the industry to expect more cases to come to light over the coming weeks so livestock farmers must now face an agonising wait to see if their stock are affected.

One thing is for sure though, the sooner our experts get to the bottom of this, the better.

By Farmers Guardian livestock editor Katie Lomas.

Why security fears won’t scupper badger cull (hopefully)

One issue has dominated the build up to, and announcement this week of, the two badger cull pilot areas.

Security – the protection of farmers, landowners, contractors and others involved from the threat of animal welfare extremists.

Behind the scenes, NFU and NBA officials have been imploring Defra and Natural England to ensure the names used to identify the areas as ‘general’ as possible – hence ‘West Gloucestershire’ and ‘West Somerset’.

The difficulty of maintaining this stance was highlighted even before the announcement was made, as leaks giving more precise locations were printed in a South West newspaper, to the immense annoyance of Ministers and industry leaders.

As Natural England follows what it believes is its duty to allow the local public to comment on the culls, it may be overly optimistic to expect the precise locations to remain under wraps until the early autumn.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t right to try.

In addition, farmers in the areas are being reassured that their names will not be published, while the intention at this stage appears to be not to announce when the culls will happen.

It is a threat the Government is taking very seriously, possibly too seriously – the Home Office’s estimate of £500,000 a year to police the culls areas came as a surprise to Defra and industry figures involved in the policy. While it demonstrates a commitment to protect those involved, the seemingly excessive stance taken by the Home Office, which pushed to delay the cull until after the Olympics because of policing concerns is upping the ante on the whole issue of security.

After all, nobody knows at this stage how big as issue it will prove to be.

There will be protests and some direct action, for sure. But some of the key figures involved in drawing up the policy are quietly confident, based partly on the experience of the Randomised Badger Culling Trials and relatively muted public response to recent announcements on the policy, believe the threat may have been overstated.

Only time will tell, but that is their fervent hope.

The issue is, after all, of great significance to the success of the pilot culls. The two areas  partly because of the level of farmer support already secured within them. But they need more to ensure the 70 per cent land coverage target is met.
Personal security is, along with the financial cost, the biggest concern cited by those still wavering.

There is potentially a huge amount to gain in the policy in terms of the long-term health of England’s cattle and badgers. A number of important hurdles need to be overcome before it is rolled out nationally, including securing sufficient farmer sign up and, of course, delivering the culls effectively and humanely.

It would a desperate shame if the security threat – real or otherwise – got in the way of any of this.

So, to ensure security is not a make or break issue, it will take some bravery from those involved at local level, some common sense from Defra, Natural England and the police, and above all, clear public explanation from industry and Government as to why and how it is being done.

Bodies like the Badger Trust and RSPCA will no doubt be keen to play their part in making the distinction among their supporters between peaceful protest and direct action, too.

Wiseman and Muller, a bolt from the blue

Nobody expected German yogurt manufacturer and Robert Wiseman to announce a merger this week.

By Howard Walsh

Who wishes they had bought shares in Robert Wiseman Dairies last week ?  More to the point who would have expected it anyway.

The bolt from the blue — German yoghurt maker Muller making a bid for Wiseman — was not the one many people in the dairy industry would have thought of putting their money on.

And it doesn’t  actually reduce the number of big processors as some people maintain would be good for producers and would maybe reduce the pressure on processors to ‘buy’ market share.

As Minister Jim Paice said at this week’s Semex conference, the constant price squabbles along the supply chain have to stop. But we’ll have to wait for that one.

Clearly First Milk is now in a better place – not that it hasn’t been since Mustoe and Allum came to the helm – with a potential £28m to spend from the sale of its 10 per cent stake in Wiseman.

Farmers Guardian business editor, Howard Walsh

NFU elections: Who said democracy was dead?

ON February 22, the 90 or so members of the NFU will be presented with a clear choice as they gather in a stuffy Birmingham hotel room to elect their president for the next two years.

To vote for Peter Kendall. Or  nobody.

Mr Kendall is expected to win.

The nominations for the three NFU officeholder positions –  which also reveal that Mr Kendall’s deputy Meurig Raymond faces only two challengers for his post – must reflect, in part, a satisfaction with the current rude health of the NFU and the job being done by its leadership.

Mr Kendall has his critics, most vociferously from within the South West livestock community.

But most people connected to the NFU – including many for whom his hi-tech, sustainable intensification vision of farming does not sit easily – acknowledge the excellent job he has done over the past six years.

He has led with authority, been a superb communicator of his positive, progressive farming message and undoubtedly has the ear of Government, as the recent Oxford Ministerial speeches show.

Mr Raymond has also been seen as an effective number two, albeit operating on a much lower profile.

As some posters on our website put it this week, ‘if ain’t broke…’

Why change a winning team, particularly – as both president and deputy have pointed out – with two ‘massive’ unresolved issues in the form of CAP reform and bovine TB still to grapple with?

Nonetheless, the absence of even a single challenger to Mr Kendall – not even a Handley or a Mead, let alone a Raymond or a Jones – has raised questions this week about the state of democracy within the NFU (after all, even Vladamir Putin will face some challengers when he stands for the Russian presidency the following month!).

None of these questions is bigger than who will succeed Mr Kendall when he does finally step down, probably – but not, he insists, definitely – in two year’s time?

The lack of competition appears to betray doubts among the leading candidates themselves, and the voting council, about their ability to fill Mr Kendall’s shoes?

Practical considerations come into it, too, as one potential candidate told me. He highlighted the commitment required to even stand for election. The hustings alone demand a whole week away from the farm business – a possible deterrent for some.

The ‘farm business versus NFU’ question has a wider context. Serving as an officeholder leaves little time to focus on the business. Another council member –  who would appear to be a prime candidate for future leader – recently told me he simply could not spare the time away from his business to do the job. Only those willing and able to effectively step away from their business can do the job.

There is not much the NFU could do about that.

But a more uncomfortable complaint for the NFU, which traditionally faces calls for one-member, one-vote at election time, is about the electoral process itself.

There have been dark mutterings, notably from ex-livestock chairman and Devon farmer Richard Haddock, of a cosy ‘stitch up’ between the council and leadership to maintain the status quo.

It’s not just the permanently disgruntled who want change. Commenting on our website this week,  Guy Smith, who, unlike Mr Haddock, remains close to the NFU hierarchy, called for a re-think of the electoral process, arguing that NFU democracy is ‘no longer fit for purpose’.

This debate is much more about the future than the present, which appears in good hands.

It is therefore significant that a much healthier seven names will appear on the ballot paper for the vice president slot, where Gwyn Jones will have to defend his position against, among others, livestock chairman Alistair Mackintosh and former VP Paul Temple, who is also standing for deputy.

The races for deputy and vice president could yet spice up the February elections – as Mr Temple said, they are all about who will be the next president of the NFU.

Who said democracy was dead?

What do you think? Are the NFU nominations a sign that all is well? Or is reform needed?

@alistairdriver

Retail price wars – good news for consumers, or is it?

Photo by ysiris on Flickr

THE consumer is king. So when the perfect storm arises of a global food commodity price rise at a time when consumers are feeling the pinch on the High Street, retailers have no qualms about what they have to do.

Retailers are protecting British consumers from the full-force of global commodity cost increases, with ‘unprecedented levels’ of discounting, the British Retail Consortium boasted this week.

UK must fight hard on CAP reform

The UK is historically perceived as being on the periphery of EU negotiations on key issues like the euro, the budget or the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Despite Caroline Spelman’s insistence that the coalition Government is determined to embark on the next round of CAP reform in a spirit of ‘positive relationships’ with EU partners, her comments this week suggested the same old story may be about to unfold.

Her clearly stated desire to push for a substantial shift of funds away from direct payments and towards pillar 2 rural development policies seems to put her odds with other member states and Brussels.