Politics

NFU president Minette Batters has said the battle over protecting standards in trade deals is the ‘biggest political challenge’ the union has ever faced.

The EU has promised to learn lessons from the coronavirus pandemic by developing a new food security contingency plan.

North East MSP Mike Rumbles has called for changes to be made to the Scottish Agriculture Bill to limit Ministers’ power over future policy.

NFU Cymru president John Davies has called on the Welsh Government to pause and review its work on post-Brexit policy as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

Around half of Welsh farmers who applied for Glastir payments for 2019 commitments were still waiting for their money at the start of May, prompting concern about how the planned post-Brexit scheme will function.

The Scottish Agriculture Bill needs a sunset clause to stop Ministers being able to change policy without scrutiny over the coming decades, says Mike Rumbles, MSP for the North East of Scotland.

In promising to uphold the UK’s high food production standards, but refusing to explain how, the Government has displayed a failure of imagination on post-Brexit trade policy, says Tom Lancaster, acting head of land, seas and climate policy at the RSPB.

With the final take-up of the Pick For Britain scheme patchy, Government must come up with a ‘Plan B’ to ensure growers can continue to access enough labour after Brexit, says Daniel Zeichner, Labour’s Shadow Farming Minister.

Banning imports is an impractical and probably illegal idea which was always doomed to fail, but there are other ways to protect our domestic food standards, says Cambridgeshire Fens farmer Tom Clarke.

An amendment has been tabled to the Agriculture Bill which would allow the UK to break away from restrictive EU rules on gene editing.