The Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) supports the Prime Minister in holding a “Farm to Fork” summit looking at the importance of domestic food production and the role that it pays in both feeding our nation and delivering high quality food products to the world through trade.

The TFA’s National Chairman, Mark Coulman, who will be attending the summit to represent the tenanted sector of agriculture said “Issues around climate change, the war in Ukraine, the coronavirus pandemic, and global inflationary pressures generally, have rightly heightened the sensitivity to issues around food security. However, we are coming to these issues very late in the day. The TFA has been arguing for years that the Government should be paying greater attention to issues around food security. To date, regardless of political persuasion, Governments down the years have lacked the necessary foresight to properly address the issue. We have had a myriad of reports over the past 25 years focusing on the need for the Government to give a higher priority to food security issues and yet, little if anything has been achieved. This urgently needs to change, and it is therefore vital that this summit is more than just a tick box exercise”.

**The TFA has set out 10 key points that the Government must take forward:**

• Identify that market failure exists in the structure of supply chains which leaves farmers virtually powerless to control the terms under which they sell their products to processors, retailers and food service providers.

• Confirm and enhance the role of the Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA) in tackling the market failure in food supply chains. The GCA must have more powers to undertake scrutiny of supply chains and a wider remit to be able to take a truly “farm to fork” approach. The GCA should be tasked with investigating and reporting on the balance of risk and margin at each level of the supply chain.

• Using our newly found trade freedoms to enhance our ability to export the outputs of our food and farming industry. This should be a top priority for the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board supported by both the Department for Business and Trade and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

• Ensuring that we do not undermine our domestic food safety, environmental and animal welfare standards in allowing imports into the UK which fall below those standards.

• Providing the necessary support to secure the labour requirements of the food and farming sector through a more targeted approach on visa provision focusing on needs rather than a narrow definition of skills.

• Implementing the 74 recommendations of the Rock Review from the Tenancy Working Group to ensure that the tenanted sector of agriculture can play its full part in delivering the food and environmental security of the nation.

• Fully implementing all the planned elements of the new Environmental Land Management schemes without delay and ensuring fair access for all active farmers including tenants and commoners.

• Safeguarding the loss of land from agriculture to schemes targeting rewilding, woodland planting, renewable energy and other developments which detracts from delivering food security with uncertain benefits for the environment.

• Making it a legal requirement for public sector food procurement to take a “Britain first” approach.

• Providing plan led productivity support for farms to improve innovation and fixed equipment.

“The Farming community deserves a greater degree of recognition for the role it plays in delivering our food security and for the ongoing environmental management of the 70% of the UK landmass under its care. However, with the phasing out of the Basic Payment Scheme and the, to date, piecemeal development of new public payments for public goods schemes, we are in danger of placing both our food and environmental security at risk. The UK and Devolved Administrations must ensure that new schemes are properly thought through, developed and implemented to secure the resilience of the food security and environmental benefits being delivered,” said Mr Coulman.

“This is a complex area for which there is no single, silver bullet. We have wasted too much time already. We must now give adequate focus to all that needs to be done to ensure that we deliver the food security we need for our nation now and into the future,” said Mr Coulman.