Lord Rooker pledges his support to help British farmers get a fair deal

On Tuesday, we handed the signatures over to the Minister at Defra's Nobel House headquarters.

He praised the efforts of the campaign in raising key issues associated with the supply chain and pledged the Government would do what it could to ensure a fair deal for farmers.

The campaign, run in conjunction with Country Living magazine, was launched in February using the ‘No cows, no countryside' slogan.

Its core message was simple: by giving British farmers a fair deal, society would be preserving the supply of high quality, high welfare food, produced in a way that would maintain the UK countryside.

That message was delivered 52,000 times over this week. The signatories include a number of MPs and peers, 50 from across the UK political spectrum also backed an Early Day Motion supporting the campaign tabled by Liberal Democrat rural affairs spokesman Roger Williams.

Receiving the petition, Lord Rooker said that once the Competition Commission report was complete, he would ‘push as far as I can legally' to support British farmers in terms of marketing, labelling and other supply chain issues of concern.

But he was reluctant to commit to further regulation on supermarkets to curb abuse of power in the supply chain, through, for example, a tougher Code of Practice, as he said this can end up stifling enterprise.

“I would rather the pressure came from the likes of Farmers Guardian through their campaigns, exposures of bad practice and promoting the best of British,” he said.

He was adamant that while the Government could set a ‘framework' for ensuring fair trade in the supply chain, the pressure on supermarkets to change ultimately had to come from consumers.

He acknowledged that supermarkets had begun to show a much greater support for their farmers over the past six months, something he attributed to a growing awareness that the public were beginning to see them as ‘nasty people'.

“The most valuable thing supermarkets have got is their brand.” He said when they realised the public knew they were not the squeaky clean, farmer-friendly people they had been putting across and had discovered they had actually been screwing farmers down and putting them out of business, they decided to so something about it.

He also welcomed commitments by supermarkets to support farmers through the foot-and-mouth and bluetongue crises, but promised to monitor the situation.

“We will be watching to make sure there is no profiteering with FMD.

“Obviously we have got a surplus, so we have got to check that any racketeering at the expense of farmers is caught.

“The damage to the brand would be enormous and they will have me to cope with as well as the consumer.”

He also challenged supermarkets to extend their commitments to meat sourcing to British chicken.

“We are now importing over 1,500 tonnes of cooked chicken meat a week when we weren't importing any four years ago.”

He finished by saying he would urge everyone to: “Buy British first and ask how it's been produced. Don't buy something if you don't know where it's come from.”