Labour's Huw Irranca Davies told delegates at last week’s Oxford Farming Conference that a Labour government would seek a rapprochement with other EU states if elected in the spring, claiming there would be no benefit for the UK's farmers and growers in "walking away from Europe entirely."

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He said a "Robust long-term food plan" is needed to drive fundamental change, including improving the scope of research and translation of new discoveries to those in the field. Under Labour, he promised farming would be the subject of a joined up "Industrial strategy and a growth strategy," to support rural communities and feed "The soul as well as the stomach of the nation."

Covering similar ground, environment secretary Liz Truss said in her address that farming is "A high-tech powerhouse, a sunrise industry. It is at the heart of our long-term economic plan." She outlined measures to help create producer organisations to improve farmers' bargaining power, more funding for business-focused rural development schemes and increased consumer awareness of origin labelling (adding how many of the pledges stand to benefit beleaguered dairy farmers).

The Defra secretary added that implementing recommendations made in the Bonfield report on public sector food procurement to help schools, hospitals and canteens source local food would "[Open] up a potential £400m of new business for our producers." However, Labour's Irranca-Davies countered that current government policy has leapt from "one good idea to the next" without consistency.

Failures of CAP reform

Moving on, Irranca-Davies, who was a Defra minister under the last Labour government, said public goods including sustainability and environmental gains are not being delivered under the current CAP. He said recent reforms have "Failed [for] farmers, but also failed on wildlife and the environment. They've failed to deliver simplification and failed to achieve progress towards that leaner and greener CAP and competitive farming."

The shadow minister said he is worried that "UK leadership on radical CAP reform has been lost" under the Coalition government, and that the government's "Megaphone diplomacy on the wider EU stage… has been a textbook lesson on how to lose friends and lose influence."

He continued, arguing that threats of an EU referendum in the UK have been alienating, and risked tearing down the "goodwill and trust" needed for the advancement of agriculture, and said moving away from the EU would put those areas of farming still reliant on subsidy payments "at a multi-billion pound disadvantage."

Food production and environment intrinsically linked

In Wednesday's speech, made alongside other parties' agriculture spokespeople ahead of May's general election, Irranca-Davies said Labour's food policy would involve input from the business and health departments, as well as Defra.

The MP for Ogmore called for an end to the "false argument" over food production and sustainability. He argued that food production and affordability are intrinsically linked with "[Protecting] the soil and the water and the ecosystems and biodiversity", adding that those arguing the two are mutually exclusive must be "proven wrong."

Promising to deliver long-term thinking that goes beyond electoral cycles, he said, "People want safe, nutritious, affordable food. But people also want a healthy, diverse ecosystem, which assists flood alleviation, for example, and also has rivers rich with invertebrates and fish and otters."

Future farming needs to employ more people, he argued, adding that "genuinely sustainable" agricultural policy would have side-along benefits, including increases in tourism. He said Labour would also take action on low-paid areas of agriculture.  

Irranca-Davies' Defra counterpart George Eustice said the government has worked to break down barriers to getting new entrants into farming, including looking at longer farm business tenancies. He claimed the government had gone into the reform negotiations arguing for a cheaper, simplified farm policy, and that CAP implementation reflects the desire for new requirements to be "as simple as possible."

He said, "That's why we've allowed farmers to count leguminous crops to their environmental focus area, that's why we've fought to ensure that we can include hedges towards environmental focus area, that's why we've tried to make the active farmer test as simple as possible.

"But when it comes to Pillar Two, we're really serious about delivering for the environment… 87 percent of the Pillar 2 budget is going to go on the countryside stewardship schemes, and we are going to have more targeted schemes, where we have a landscape approach and really prioritise biodiversity."