Help for industry to build greater resilience

At the Northern Farming Conference this week, the Cornwall MP said a group set up to look into the issue will be holding fresh discussions next month.

Mr Eustice told Country Week: “The farming industry has always been one that’s particularly exposed to risk because you’ve got the double whammy of the potential for crop failure and animal diseases, and sometimes very volatile commodity prices.”

A risk resilience group was set up earlier this year following the dreadful weather in the spring, he said. A fund of £250,000 helped hill farmers cover the cost of removing fallen stock but more could be done longer term, he said.

“It ranges from very simple small things to better weather forecasting that’s more farming specific and improving communications between farmers and other farm support groups in an area to perhaps some longer term issues such as developing more of a market for insurance schemes which might be able to help farmers.”

In the US and Canada, insurance schemes partly subsidised by their respective governments cover farm losses if they fall to beneath certain levels.

Mr Eustice said such a scheme in the UK would not work in tandem with the Common Agricultural Policy.

“There had been some discussion, potentially within pillar two of having some sort of government-backed insurance scheme. We took the view that while you have still got direct payments as the Single Farm Payment there wasn’t really the case for an insurance scheme because if you’re ever to have something like that it should be instead of the Single Farm Payment where it is places like Canada and the US, not in addition to.”