Agriculture (South-West)

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Cummings, and thank you for finding the time to be here for our debate the important subject of agriculture in the south-west. We must use this rare opportunity to discuss agriculture in Westminster Hall because debate on agriculture in the main Chamber has been almost extinguished. It is hard to remember the occasions on which we have talked about one of our major industries in the Chamber proper. I believe that there was a debate in July 2007, but that was on an estimates day on a Select Committee report. Before that, it was December 2002. Therefore, we are talking about seven years without a debate on agriculture in Government time in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. I find that quite extraordinary, not least because in the dim and distant past, when I was a spokesman on agriculture for my party, we seemed to talk about nothing else, but that was at a time of major political crisis due to the existence of various cattle diseases. I want to cover a range of topics, none of which I will go into in any great depth. I hope that other colleagues will have the opportunity to do so. It is often the case that when I talk to farmers in my constituency, most of whom are dairy farmers—dairy is the predominant sector there—the main thing that they want to talk about, with good reason, is the weather. Last year, the weather was a significant factor in farming. It was the wettest harvest in living memory. Over the past few weeks, Somerset has had flash floods, one of which sadly took away my car in the process, about which I feel rather sore. When farmers are not talking about the weather, they are talking about prices. Last year saw a small improvement in the general state of farm incomes in the south-west, which is very good news. None the less, it masks a deeper problem, which I will come on to in a moment. One of the difficulties is price volatility. Over the past year, wheat and cereal prices have yo-yoed. There has been a vast range of prices. They went up massively in the early part of the year and then plummeted towards the end of it. Was that because of weather conditions, the state of the harvest, or the agriculture industry? No, it was because speculators were playing the commodity market and distorting the realities of what is the genuine position of the state of production.