Industry Eye: Making rural voices heard

UK agriculture will not escape the cutbacks in public spending that all sectors face, and we may also have to accept that some rural issues will not be an important part of the Government's agenda for the next few years.

However, the economy will be, and the rural economy is a vital part of that.

We must lend our support to the bodies that lobby Government on our behalf and take every opportunity to stress the important role the rural economy plays financially, as well as in maintaining our precious countryside environment.

In setting policies to stimulate the economy, the Government will be mindful of how reliant our nation has become on service industries, in particular banking and finance, and how exposed that left us to the banking crisis and the recession that followed.

All parties agree on the need to stimulate our manufacturing base; the rural economy, and UK agriculture in particular, plays an important part in that, and a competitive industry is central to providing solutions to the challenges ahead.

Whilst UK agriculture contributes only a small proportion of national Gross Domestic Product, its contribution to the economy as a whole is far greater than this measure suggests.

It does not reflect its importance within the retail sector or the number of rural communities and businesses that rely on agriculture, and nor does it reflect the non-financial benefits the industry provides in maintaining our landscape and environment.

The small size of the figure in the context of the whole, however, may explain why the words "agriculture" and "rural" did not appear in the coalition agreement published on May 12. Given the task facing the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, this is probably not surprising. However, a page and a half of that seven-page document was devoted to the environment.

There is a commitment to introduce "measures to promote green spaces and wildlife corridors in order to halt the loss of habitats and restore biodiversity". If these measures are focused on positive grant funding rather than on negative legislative protection, there will be opportunities for farmers and landowners.

We should not underestimate the link here between maintaining and enhancing our environment and the review of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS), which is due in 2012.

In 2009, UK agriculture produced approximately 4bn of profit; of this, 3.65bn (91.25 per cent) came from the SPS. This underlines the importance of the scheme to our rural economy, and the need for the Government to protect it, as well as to follow up on its promises to cut red tape and make supermarkets behave more responsibly.

To protect the SPS in the review process, we must stress the environmental benefits provided by UK farmers, largely without payment.

The Government's Land Use Policy Group has calculated that, if the industry were paid fully for the environmental work it does each year, it would cost 1.9bn, but in reality the grants received under environmental schemes such as the ELS and HLS amount to little more than 790m.

This argument, together with the message that a competitive UK agricultural sector can play an important part in revitalising the UK economy, is politically much more powerful than arguing simply for production support.