Extract from Wales Assembly: Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs - July 11

I presume you're referring to the basic payments scheme and direct payments. I don't believe the common agricultural policy has delivered the outcomes that we think we can get more out of and that are of such huge importance here in Wales. 

Well, I thank you for that reply, and you're right that I am referring to the break of the link between what you could describe as a basic income and a move—significant shift—to outcomes based on public goods, as you've just described it, which is Treasury language to justify some of this. I understand that, and I think there's a lot in your consultation paper that is to be worked with and the grain of which I accept. But in breaking the link between the land that a farmer is responsible for, and the family farm in particular in Wales, you are also breaking the link between wholesome, sustainable food production and the ongoing support of payments. And I wonder whether you still believe such food production is in itself a public good or merely the associated environmental benefits, which you've just described. 

Food production is vitally important and I refer to the five principles and about delivering on the objectives of the five principles, and food production is one of them, and I was absolutely determined that it would be one of them, but it's not a public good. Food is not a public good. It has a market and so it cannot be a public good. So, what I suppose we're doing is creating a market, if you like, for public goods, but food is not a public good.

I think that the way you produce food is a public good and I think that sustainable and wholesome food is something that we should be trying to achieve for the wider benefit of the environment, our public health and everything else, so I would certainly want and urge people to respond to your consultation in making that strong link.

What we don't want to see, and I'm sure you'd agree, is the end of the family farm in Wales, the end of farmers who are responsible and stewards of the land that they either own or have tenanted—because it's increasingly also a tenanted landscape that we see. And we wouldn't want the end of that and then the replacement of family farms by employed land managers or people who are wardens or anything else. The key to maintaining your safe environment is that long-term investment, that long-term resilience, and a family farm and a farmer, himself or herself, at the heart of it.

But, as you have suggested that a greater number of people will be able to fish in this declining pond, can you also reply as to how we will ensure that this will be a long-term and sustainable construct under your consultation? At the moment, the common agricultural policy is seven years; though there are changes, they are often gradual, and farmers, particularly if we're moving towards public goods, will need to demonstrate things like carbon capture or flood prevention not over one year or two years, but over a long period of time. So, are you taking fully into account the need for multi-annual frameworks and investment in your land management policies?

I want to start by saying that I don't want to see the loss of any small family farms—I don't want to see the loss of one farm. However, we have to recognise that Brexit brings immense challenges for the sector and that's why we need to do all we can to support them. They are custodians of our land and that's the message that—. Funnily enough, I've just done an interview now, ahead of the Royal Welsh Show, and I was asked if my perceptions had changed and I said that the one thing I hadn't realised was how much farmers take pride in their land and making sure that they just look after it for the period of time that they do and to make sure it's there for future generations. When I was out in New Zealand in April, the one lesson I came back with, after what happened to them back in 1984 with that cliff edge, was that they lost so many small farms, and I'm determined that that won't happen post Brexit here in Wales.

This is part of the consultation—you're quite right that they are a long-term sector and they need that multi-year security. And that will form part of the consultation around the two schemes that we've got, and also I've made it very clear—and I hope that's come out in the consultation launch—that we will have this transition period, because basic payments will continue in 2018 and 2019 and then, from 2020, we will start the new scheme. But there has to be a multi-year transition period: you can't expect to go from basic payment straight to the new scheme. So, I'll use Rural Payments Wales, which you'll know is very successful—we're the best in the UK—and I will use that group to make sure that we get the scheme correct from the beginning.