Brexit: Agriculture and Farm Animal Welfare (European Union Committee Report) — House of Lords, 2017-10-17
Topic: Agriculture
John Davies (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, with very great respect to the noble Lord, I do not think that he has read the report on animal welfare which is before us. It makes it quite clear that WTO rules do not, contrary to what he said, provide a basis for excluding meat produced at standards which are too low I remind the House of my interests as declared in the register. I own some land in Lincolnshire, which I regularly rent out for grazing. I will endeavour to be very succinct and to advance simply six propositions in the course of six minutes The first proposition is that British agriculture will never again operate in such favourable circumstances as it does now, while we are a full member of the EU. That is simply because agricultural policy and agricultural subsidies are decided by 28 countries, in the great majority of which the political weighting of agriculture is much greater than it is in this country. Therefore, the best friend of the British farmer has always been the French, German, Polish or Dutch Minister of Agriculture, not the British Minister of Agriculture, who has a brief from the Treasury saying, "For God’s sake cut the cost and reduce the subsidy if you possibly can" My second proposition is that that would be a problem if we remained outside the EU but in the single market in some form or another, because it would mean that over the years, with increasing discrepancy, British farmers would be subsidised and supported at a lower level than their competitors. In any market that obviously produces distortions, and things become very bad for the less favoured party, which in this case would be the British farmer Proposition number three is that far more serious is the scenario that the Government want to lead us into. It is one where we are not a member of the EU single market but endeavour to sign free trade agreements with lots of people around the world. The Government deceive themselves entirely about the prospects of doing that, by the way. I have explained on many occasions in our debates that there is very little prospect indeed of signing such a deal with China unless we are prepared to drop steel quotas, or with India unless we are prepared to accept Mr Modi’s demands for massive immigration into this country, or with the United States unless we are prepared to accept hormone-injected beef and chlorinated chicken. So there are great difficulties in that and, even if there were not, it would be absurd to say that we should throw away the benefit of the particularly favourable terms under which we can sell 70% of our exports to the EU and to those countries with which the EU has free trade agreements, and to suggest that we can compensate for that with the remaining 30% of our exports. As I have just explained, more than 90% of that 30%—that is, the three countries I mentioned—are very unlikely to do a deal with us at all. Therefore, the Government’s policy urgently needs rethinking from the bottom up. They are leading this country into a minefield, which is uncharted from their point of view, and I am afraid that they do not see the great dangers that we are facing However, in the event that we sign free trade agreements with some other countries—let us say members of the old British Commonwealth, such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada—they will be largely concerned to sell us their agricultural products. We will have very large refrigerated ships arriving in London every week with massive amounts of cheap Australian frozen beef, which will knock the bottom out of that market Therefore, my fourth proposition is that in those circumstances we will have the worst of all possible worlds. We will have a situation in which British farmers meet competition from countries with cheaper labour and considerable efficiencies and economies of scale, undercutting our producers in the domestic market —and, at the same time, because the continentals will not allow us tariff-free access to their markets while we allow other countries to export to the UK in competition with their exports, we will have to face tariffs on our exports to the EU. That point has already been well made. The tariffs are very high—20%, 40% or 60% at present, depending on the product. That would be the worst of all possible worlds for British agriculture I make two propositions on the animal welfare issues that have been raised in the second of the reports before us. Proposition number one: it is a total waste of time and will not contribute one iota to the sum of animal happiness, and will almost certainly contribute to the detriment of animal happiness, to concoct a system of animal welfare and not protect it at the frontier by excluding imported products that are themselves produced to lower standards. If you do that, you are simply exporting the industry to somewhere else in the world where animal standards are lower, losing employment in this country and generating employment somewhere else, and the animals will certainly be treated far worse wherever they are then raised. Quite disgusting things happen to these poor animals, including in what we might think of as sophisticated markets such as the United States, which runs almost a complete zero grazing system. This will not contribute at all to animal welfare but will destroy employment in our own country. It does not make sense. My final proposition is this: it is not possible to stop products coming in at the frontiers, as logically should be done, because it is not consistent with WTO rules. The committee could have been slightly more unambiguous on this point, as it is quite clear that there are no WTO rules to provide for that. It is therefore quite certain that a large number of countries will say that it is excluded by the WTO rules. We have already heard examples this evening of how the WTO can take a very perverse line, if it wishes to, in pursuit of the interests of a particular nation. The idea of renegotiating the rules of the WTO is complete nonsense —it would take decades. And why would any of these countries agree in principle to change rules that are, in many cases, in their favour and against our interests? I am not sure that that problem can be resolved The position is this: the prospects of the British farmer are pretty grim and the prospects for animal welfare are pretty grim. We owe it to the nation to say those two things extremely clearly.