As the General Election approaches, the FUW, jointly with NFU Cymru and Wales YFC, have arranged 15 hustings across Wales to provide our members with an opportunity to question their local candidates on Welsh farming and rural matters.
Welsh farming is at an important crossroads which will determine its future for decades to come.
Whilst its direction heavily depends on the development of devolved agricultural policies, we must not forget how decisions made by the incoming UK administration will effectively determine the degree of funding the Welsh Government has available to support agriculture and rural development. The next government will also determine the extent of which Welsh producers will be expected to compete against producers in other UK nations and across the globe on various levels.
Our departure from the European Union (EU) and its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has not only allowed each of the UK administrations to design their own agricultural policies for the first time in decades, it also marked a point in history when we moved away from the certainty provided by multi-annual budget allocations and towards a budgetary system where Welsh farmers are almost entirely dependent on annual funding commitments made by the UK Treasury.
Despite the 2019 UK Conservative Manifesto stating “...we will guarantee the current annual CAP budget to farmers in every year of the next Parliament”, Wales has received around a quarter of a billion pounds less in funding for agriculture and rural development than could have been expected had the UK remained within the EU. This equates to a loss of around £3,000 per Basic Payment Scheme claimant in Wales per year since 2019.
Despite these promises being broken on multiple occasions, whether due to a matter of interpretation or clever accounting, who knows whether the extent of these cuts could have been far greater had we not held the UK Conservative government to account on their commitments.
We must also remember that this compares to a budget that was allocated and agreed in 2013 which brought an average of £331 million per year into Wales in the form of CAP support - this support has allowed the average Welsh farming business to inject upwards of £100,000 per year into the wider economy, supporting an array of secondary and tertiary businesses.
According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, which uses Consumer Price Index inflation data from the Office for National Statistics, the annual EU CAP legacy budget for Wales should now equal around £450 million - just for us to stand still.
The UK Conservative 2024 Manifesto promises to “increase the UK-wide farming budget by £1 billion over the Parliament, ensuring it rises by inflation in every year.” Based on current Welsh allocations, this would equate to an increase in Welsh funding for agriculture by around £20 million per year. This comes nowhere near the funding required. However, the omission of any financial commitments for agriculture within the UK Labour Manifesto is arguably a far bigger concern.
As farmers are being asked to deliver far more than ever before in the context of climate change mitigation and biodiversity restoration, alongside producing sustainable food and making innumerable contributions to rural areas and Welsh society, multi-annual funding commitments for agriculture and rural development are a must to ensure Welsh farmers can make sustainable and long-term investments.