Cliff Edge anyone?

Oh Roses you've burst my bubble now

inews.co.uk/essentials/news/politics/michael-goves-advisor-says-british-farmers-become-addicted-subsidies/

Do you think this includes the queen?

I would imagine that Bill Gates would get a subsidy if he had a farm in the eu ( even more if the farm was in France) under the madness of eu farming subsidies.

Jay Raynor has a huge article in the Observer this week relating to food security after Brexit.

It is worth a read.

He talks about the rise of the middle class in places like China and India, who will and are demanding more of the world's resources including food. Food is therefore likely to become the world's biggest economic battle grounds. The fall in the value of sterling has of course made food more expensive and this is almost certainly likely to get worse leading to double digit inflation in the price of food.

The logic of the danger above is therefore to become as self sufficient as possible. Food is in Rayners opinion sold too cheaply, and if subsidies dry up as is very likely judging by the noise coming from Gove. But with greater self sufficiency comes greater danger to our environment. We must encourage best practice and monoculture add to the issues. We should be as diverse as possible in our farming products.
Single farm payments need to be diverted to being used in a more sustainable and practice manner.

We need to engage with the concept of a small carbon footprint, in order to havecas little impact on our environment as is possible. And to this end some form of sustainability rating in food production needs to be introduced. This idea should ensure that localism only works where the right conditions for a particular product prevail.
Supermarkets need much closer regulation, where scandals like the horse meat incident and the way small suppliers are forced to somehow produce their products more and more cheaply, whilst at the same time waiting for far too long for payment. We need to protect our small suppliers from these heavyweight supermarket chains.

Brexit risks food security and without the sort of strong regulatory system we have helped design along with other countries in Europe we all run the risk of being presented with meat produced in dirty low animal welfare conditions.

Conclusion
"Brexit is implicated in every aspect of out food supply chain and risks imperilling the very health of the nation.
A few year ago, when discussing food security in thecUK, Lord Cameron - a farmer and first head of the Countryside Agency - said Britain was just nine meLs away from anarchy-----------when I first heard this statement I regarded it as an interesting case of hyperbole. Now it feels like a prediction. Of all the things said to me when I was researching my recent article on the importance of migrant labour to our food supply chain, the one that stayed with me monst was from the Food and Drink Federation's Ian Wright " if you can't feed a country, you have no country"
Amen to that"

Raynor has sent his report to Gove. He has made no charge for the article.

It's a shame he didn't go to the round table meeting set up by Gove, sometimes getting a group of interesting people together can produce good results.

I was reading this morning about the dreadful conditions the Americans are breeding their chickens in - this causes the need for the chlorine wash. They have cross bred them to get more breast meat and the birds are much heavier with this and too heavy for their legs to take the weight! Some farmers have given up the job.
All this is caused by the companies buying the birds as they pay the farmer by bird weight and the least amount of food given. There are no regulations as to how much area each bird needs to walk around etc - makes you feel ill.

Front page article in the Observer about what we have already discussed - the chaos at the borders that is likely after Brexit.

It would be nice to hear of any plans - anybody heard anything?

Jay Rayner explained on his blog why he didn't go to Gove's meeting:

A few weeks ago, I was approached by an official at the Department of the Environment Food and Rural Affairs. She told me the Secretary of State was holding a round table discussion for ‘innovative thinkers’ on July 25 to give him ‘food for thought in the early days of the new job’. He had asked for me to be invited.

The Secretary of State is Michael Gove. I found this peculiar. Just before Christmas, when he was in the political wilderness following his calamitous attempt to secure the Tory leadership post the Brexit vote, he trolled me on Twitter. He accused me of behaving in a dodgy manner by offering to retweet photographs of my book being sold by retailers. He said it was a journalistic conflict of interest, despite the fact that none of them are retailers of the sort I review. He also accused me of failing to offer myself for public service (by implication, as he had). Hilarious: at the time, he was taking a six-figure salary from Rupert Murdoch to write for The Times when he was also employed as an MP.

It was a bizarre episode which you can read about more fully here. (I understand Gove was motivated by my having taken his wife, Sarah Vine, to task for attacking Ed Milliband over his two kitchens. I pointed out that she and Gove bought theirs using more than £7000 of public funds which they then had to return during the expenses scandal.)

And now here he was, as Secretary of State, asking me for advice. Michael Gove, the man who railed against too many experts during the Brexit referendum, was looking for my expertise. (For those wondering why he cared what the bloke from Masterchef thought, in 2013 I published a book about food security and sustainability in the 21st century).

After much hard thought, I have concluded I am just not grown up enough to play the game of British politics and sit in a room with a man of whom I think so little.

www.jayrayner.co.uk/news/michael-gove-asked-me-to-a-meeting-to-share-my-expertise-i-declined-instead-ive-given-him-a-piece-of-my-mind/

Thanks maizie sometimes you lose the will to live I assume posters know about it but chose to ignore these facts, when posting comments out of context.

Well, you can't expect posters to know everything, ww

So true maize

Someone on another forum brought up the subject of possible food shortages after Brexit, and it reminded me of the Dig for Victory campaign during WW2. Because there was nothing coming in from abroad the UK had to be self-sufficient. All spare land taken over for allotments, backyard pigs and chickens etc.
Everyone was busy trying to avoid starvation, so there was no obesity, and the health of the nation improved.
No NHS in those days.

sumofus has a petition about keeping EU food standards after Brexit.
Waitrose has said it will be keeping to the same high standards as they always have.
The next one is being sent to the Co-op. They want signatures on that one now.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/17/uk-has-nearly-800-livestock-mega-farms-investigation-reveals

By the way, we already have 800 megafarms in the UK. Animal welfare not very high in them.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/29/uk-border-customs-chaos-hit-hard-brexit

Is this the article you were referring to, whitewave?

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/30/tensions-flare-in-cabinet-over-post-brexit-free-movement

How long do you think the government will last?
I bet they are regretting winning the election now.

This will be in tomorrow's Guardian, just to give you something to think about before the paper arrives, whitewave.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/29/eu-workers-fifth-labour-force-18-sectors-britain-economy

What's the unemployment rate here?

So we have Hammond, Rudd, Green, Gauke and Clark for a soft Brexit and recognising the fact that immigrants are vital to our economic health.

On the hard Brexit side is Fox, Davis, not sure about Johnson not sure he knows to be fair, who are willing to risk our economic future.

Richard Murphy has put on one of his "here's one I did earlier" blogs this morning. In this case it's one he wrote just before the EU ref. speculating on what would happen if Leave won.

I think he was pretty accurate. This just a short extract.

In fact I would argue recession is unavoidable. Investment in the UK will go on hold during renegotiation. No big business is going to sink millions or even billions into our economy without knowing what the future terms of UK trade might be. In itself this will be enough to trigger recession. Couple that with a planned withdrawal of certain parts of banking (those that need an EU regulatory base) from London and a downturn has to happen. Try as I might I cannot see where the stimulus happens. A sterling fall of 30% in recent years has not boosted UK growth so no one should respond by saying a fall in sterling us the counter-balance to all this. That will only create import induced cost push inflation, which is just about the last sort we want as it serves no domestic purpose at all.

www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2017/07/31/brexits-all-going-horribly-in-accordance-with-my-expectation/

An ONS study.

"It shows that nearly half – 47.6% – of employees in the fruit and vegetable “processing and preserving sector” are from EU countries. A similar proportion – 44.4% – are involved in meat processing. More than a third – 37.6% – of those processing fish, crustaceans and molluscs are EU migrants.

In agriculture, just under 35% of workers employed in what the ONS describes as the “growing of nonperennial crops” are EU citizens, along with more than a quarter of workers involved in the manufacture of prepared animal feed. And just under a quarter involved in the “manufacture of bakery & farinaceous [starch] products” are EU workers."

A third of those processing fish - i.e., the sort of business that Gove's dad had - come from EU countries, yet he can't decide which side he is on either.

It sounds more like a motor way traffic jam with no way out..at least I can jump off the cliff edge!

Apparently it is all worth it maize unclear as to why it is worth it, but that is what we are told.

What I find so worrying is that day after day articles etc are posted onto this thread, and apart from a personal dig either at the poster or person who wrote the article, there hasn't been a single solitary post that gives sensible intelligent reasons as to why we are leaving and suffering the consequences.

Here's another prediction of Murphy's.

"I suspect this fragile consensus will hold as yet desire the massive political in-fighting that is now apparent. The question is how long ‘as yet’ implies. My own instinct is it means until October. To put it another way, that means Tory party conference. However well stage managed this exercise in lauding the duly chosen ‘dear leader’ usually is I cannot see that veneer surviving the pressure this year. The Tory party fringe is going to be riven with open hostility. It is hard to see how that can be prevented from spilling over into public dissent. And from where the support for May will come in all this is very hard to imagine. It is very obviously absent already. In that case it will take quite extraordinarily thick skin for May to survive this.

It may also take ability beyond even the Tory instinct for power to keep the party intact as well. The Brexit hard line and Hammond pragmatic dealers seem so far apart that the chance of reconciliation appears remote in the extreme. If May cannot hold them together, whether she’s herself a lame duck or not, leaves the prospect of unity around any other candidate very hard to imagine. Cameron’s ultimate failure would be a split Tory party, something not known in modern history but for which the Corn Laws provide resonant precedent. I am not, of course, sure it will happen. But I certainly think it possible. And with it the government would fall."