This Government has turned its back on British farmers with Australian trade deal - Yorkshire Post Letters

MIKE Baldwin’s letter (The Yorkshire Post, December 30) suggesting threats to British agriculture from the Government’s free trade deal with Australia is real and threatens the very heart of British agriculture as we know it.

We should be concerned about threats to the English countryside – small farms, many of which are farmed by tenant farmers, could disappear, along with the patchwork system of fields, hedgerows and small village communities because under the new government farm payment schemes, large farms are favoured rather than small.

The Government is offering incentives for farmers to leave the land, estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 could leave, and, to enable British farmers to compete with Australian farms which produce beef in feed lots containing over 100,000 cows corralled together; bred intensively, with growth hormones and antibiotics, larger industrial units will replace our small farms.

The tragedy is the Government has totally liberalised the trade deal with Australia and in so doing have committed our country to deregulation of food production and environmental protection.

According to a recent Radio 4 Today programme’s guest editor James Rebank – Cumbrian farmer and author – farmers are concerned for their future and for the landscape they have helped to create in areas such as the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales.

We have given away farming and farming safeguards to favour Australian farmers and with it our ability to make any future changes as all requests for changes to trade deals, once signed, can only be resolved by the World Trade Organisation which can take years.

This Government has turned its back on British farmers and the British people by putting their political ideological free market economy first.