Welsh farmers have launched a campaign to revitalise the image of local food at this year’s Royal Welsh Show. The Farmer’s Union of Wales (FUW) launched its ‘Help Cut Food Miles...Buy the Welsh One’ campaign along with merchandise promoting Welsh food last week. image expired

The farmers pointed to Defra statistics which show that the UK is currently growing less of its own food than at any time since 1968. Britain’s self-sufficiency, in terms of how much food grown in-country is consumed here, has fallen to 58.9 per cent. The campaign has received the backing of Slow Food groups in Wales, who campaign to see a shortening of the food chain and promote local cuisine.

Award-winning chef and leader of a Welsh Slow Food group, Gareth Johns, enthused about Welsh food and his belief in reducing food miles and damage to the environment and promoting sustainability, speaking at the FUW’s campaign launch at the show in Llanelwedd.

He said, “Slow Food supports a new model of agriculture, less intensive and healthier, founded on the knowledge and know-how of local communities. It works to safeguard local cuisines, traditional products and vegetable and animal species at risk of extinction. It stresses the importance for agricultural production and livestock breeding to maintain a balanced relationship of respect for and exchange with the surrounding ecosystem.”

FUW president Emyr Jones outlined the reasons behind the campaign and its importance to Welsh agriculture, “The last time the country grew so little of what it ate was in 1968,” he said. “This deeply worrying statistic is a reversal of the trend in recent years, when Britain started to eat more home-grown food. It comes as an increasing number of sheep and dairy farmers have abandoned the industry after failing to make enough money from farming.

“Retailers are driven by what consumers want and they want cheap food. This has meant that many farmers have been forced to lower their prices to such an extent that they have been driven out of food production. Such a drastic reduction in self-sufficiency is a worrying trend that is having serious consequences on our farming industry and climatic conditions and we demand that imports are cut back drastically.

“This startling figure highlights how the balance between food and drink exports and imports has turned heavily in favour of imports of cheaper products, many of which are produced under far less stringent controls and conditions [than] those faced by Welsh farmers.”

Mr Jones concluded, “The time has come for farmers to appeal to consumers to help us redress this unequal balance at the same time as helping their surrounding environment by cutting food miles.”