How we can end scandalously low prices paid to farmers – and protect our food security

Alistair Carmichael MP will introduce a Food Supply Chain Fairness Bill to the Commons next week, with the aim of ensuring farmers get a fairer price and clamping down on supermarkets’ power

“In the nation’s interest I urge you, at whatever personal sacrifice, to overcome all obstacles, to throw your fullest energies into the work, and to influence and encourage all who assist you, so that every possible acre shall be sown.”

When Prime Minister David Lloyd George sent those words to Orkney farmer Charles Paterson in March 1917, there was no question at the heart of government about the “vital importance” of farmers – and the essential value of every acre, and grain of food that they produced.

How times change. In the decades since, farmers and crofters have continued to play their part in supplying the nation’s table – but their incomes have stagnated along with their perceived value to successive governments.

David Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the First World War, knew the value of Orkney farmers like this one, pictured in 1915 (Picture: Hulton Archive) | Getty Images

Economic logic and national security

A new report from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission found that real incomes for farmers have stayed stock-still for the past 50 years. On an hourly basis, many farmers make less than the minimum wage.

That is why next week I am introducing the Food Supply Chain Fairness Bill to the House of Commons. It is aimed squarely at getting farmers a fairer price for their products, by beefing up market regulation and clamping down on the overbearing power of the major supermarkets, who drive down their costs by squeezing the pennies at the farmgate.

Getting farmers a better price for their produce is about basic fairness, but it is also about what is right for our country as a whole. These issues matter because of the communities they affect but also because of hard-headed economic logic and national security.

In the past, it has been an implicit – or sometimes explicit – policy of government to treat food security as a matter of international trade, and treat farmers as a slightly embarrassing legacy industry. As recently as 1984, the UK was almost 80 per cent self-sufficient in the food we produced. Now we hover around 60 per cent – but why worry about domestic food production when we can simply import from around the world?

Danger of relying on imports

If you are old enough to read this column, however, then I suspect you might be old enough to remember the double whammy of Covid and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, both of which brutally exposed the weak points in our supply chains. Above all, they showed the danger of relying too heavily on imports for our basic food supplies in an increasingly dangerous world.

All that is without engaging with the reality of climate change. How many countries that we rely upon for our supplies are likely to find their ability to produce food under pressure due to a changing climate? That is a grim prospect globally but it should also be a clarion call to maintain our own food production – if not for ourselves, then for the benefit and the future needs of others.

The Patersons in Orkney – seventh generation farmers – are still working the same land to this day. If we want to keep farming communities alive for generations to come, however, we need to act to make it happen.

Now is the time for government to turn back the clock – and accord the food our farmers’ produce with the value and the respect it has always deserved.

Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland