Britain is in danger of a “disastrous” food scandal, owing to lax post-Brexit border controls on agricultural imports, the leader of the UK’s biggest farming organisation has warned.
Minette Batters, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, accused ministers of a “dereliction of duty” in failing to ensure food and other agricultural imports were safe. She said the government had failed to learn the lessons of the horsemeat scandal of 2013.
“We are seeing little to no checks on imports that are coming in from the EU,” she said. “We have the massive risk of African swine fever in Europe, and to not be investing in our defences for keeping our biosecurity and animal and plant health safe, I think is just a dereliction of duty.”
After the horsemeat scandal, in which products such as burgers and lasagne purporting to contain 100% beef were found to show traces of horsemeat, stricter controls were put in place on many food systems.
But Batters said those controls were being eroded, with “so little checks” on imports, and pointed to recent findings that many lorries entering the UK contained fraudulent meat. “If there was a food scare from Europe, it would be very difficult to trace it right now,” she said.
“Many in [food] retail, processing and manufacturing would say that on the back of ‘horsegate’ we developed the safest, most secure food supply chain in the world. There was massive investment in safety and security and short supply chains,” she said.
“I think there’s a real risk 10 years on that we forget those lessons of the past, and there’s nothing that will bring this country to a standstill quicker than a food scare. That would be disastrous, and we want to do everything possible to avoid that. But unless the checks are put in place, and if we can’t trace everything, then of course we are at threat.”
The threat could grow much worse under trade deals with non-EU nations, she added. The vast majority of food imports are still from the EU, where controls on food are similar to those in the UK. But under trade deals with Australia and New Zealand that will soon come into force, and under potential future deals with countries such as India and Latin America, food could soon be arriving from regions with very different rules and standards.
Unfit food can pose a health threat to humans, which Batters said was “the biggest worry”, but farmers also face additional concerns about disease. The African swine fever virus has killed more than 100 million pigs globally since 2018, and is spreading in parts of Europe. “For the national pig herd, the threat of African swine fever coming here will be keeping them awake at night,” she said.
Avian influenza is also a growing fear, with some scientists warning of a likely spring outbreak among wild birds, and infections found in species from minks, otters and seals to foxes. Batters said the poultry sector was already in a weakened state, having shrunk by about 12%, mainly under the impact of inflationary pressures.
Batters will address the two-day NFU conference in Birmingham on Tuesday, where government ministers and Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour party, will attempt to woo farmers who are in many cases deeply scarred by years of turmoil. Buffeted by Brexit and the Covid pandemic, in which food supply chains were turned upside down overnight, farmers are now beset by rampant inflation that has sent the prices of fuel, fertiliser and animal feed rocketing.
Consumers will also feel the effects. There could be a serious shortage of tomatoes and cucumbers this summer, Batters warned, as growers were planting fewer than at any time since the 1980s.
Food prices are likely to stay high, as farmers struggle with costs. Although energy prices have come down from last year’s peaks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they are still as much as three times higher than before.
Yet at this crucial point for British farming, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, turned down the opportunity to address this core group of mainly Conservative voters. “The prime minister is doing a video,” said Batters. “I think it’s a real shame that he isn’t there himself, but the leader of the opposition is there. I think that speaks volumes in itself. You know, they [Labour] want to engage.”
Starmer spoke at the conference two years ago, when it was online owing to Covid, marking the first address by a Labour leader since 2008. He told the Guardian then that rural communities, often blighted by hidden poverty and stark inequality, were a key part of his ambitions. “No party can claim to represent the country if we don’t represent the countryside. Farming matters, to Labour, to the British people, and to the families and communities that make farming possible,” he said.
Batters said the Conservative government had failed to appreciate the impact of Brexit, policy and economic headwinds on the UK’s farmers. “What I probably worry about most is the whole social challenge,” she said. “Whatever you thought about the CAP [the EU common agricultural policy, which the UK left on Brexit] it very much ended up as a social subsidy to keep people on the land.”
Government policy for farm support post-Brexit has focused on providing “public money for public goods”, such as payments for farmers to nurture soils, protect wildlife and maintain waterways, in contrast to the CAP, which allocated subsidies based on the area of land farmed, often to the benefit of the biggest landowners.
But the new system, unveiled in 2018, was phased in last year with only 224 farmers signing up initially. About £10.7m was disbursed under the environmental schemes, out of the total of £2.4bn earmarked for all farm support, according to data obtained by the Guardian. Batters said the government must be more transparent on its budgets, and called for an approach that encouraged food production alongside environmental improvements.
“If we just focus on one without the other, we’re at a bare minimum going to need to double the budget [from £2.4bn],” she said. “We’ve got to be able to produce food and look after the environment; we can’t separate them.”
If the government failed to provide sufficient support to farmers, the “social infrastructure” that farming provided to the countryside would be lost and some of the most isolated and vulnerable communities in the UK would be devastated, Batters said.
“I think that’s the bit that the government doesn’t understand, because without the people we can’t deliver for the environment, we can’t deliver for food production,” she said. “When I say to members of the government, when they talk about taking land out of production, I say ‘what about the people?’ And nobody answers that question.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “We back British farmers, which is why we implement strict biosecurity controls on high-risk imports to ensure no products cross our borders which could pose a risk to the industry.
“We stringently monitor emerging outbreaks across the globe, assess any risks to our food supply chain, and work closely with the Food Standards Agency’s national food crime unit to tackle food fraud, while also promoting the sale of homegrown high-quality British produce. We also have powers to check and seize non-compliant products, and will not hesitate to do so.”
