Recommendation 3

We are not convinced that the Department sufficiently understands how its environmental and productivity ambitions will impact the food and farming sector over the next decade. Farmers will be required to free up land currently used for food production to produce environmental benefits, for example converting farmland to forestry. This may result in an increase in food imports and possibly the 6 Environmental Land Management Scheme price of food into the UK, potentially exporting the UK’s environmental impacts through food being produced in other countries where environmental standards are lower. The Department asserts that environmental benefits can be delivered alongside improvements in farm productivity, and that these improvements will mean that, despite taking land out of production to deliver environmental benefits, farmers can produce more food from the remaining land. The Department also points to productivity improvements as helping to offset farmers’ loss of direct payments but has not presented evidence to support this. Smaller farms and tenant farmers are particularly exposed as they are more reliant on direct payments, which may lead to some going out of business resulting in larger agricultural holding sizes. Recommendation: The Department should urgently explain to the Committee, showing its forecasts both for changes in land use and resulting changes in payments to farmers, how it expects its farming programmes to affect food production and farm productivity in England and report annually to Parliament on the level of food price inflation together with any changes to the proportion of the food we consume that is produced in the UK, which was 53% in 2018.1