COP27 platitudes not enough – farming is a 'green' solution

As an event, it was the same festival of hypocrisy as delegates flew in from around the world to eat the very best imported food – while lecturing the rest of us against flying and the damage that meat does to the planet.

The massive elephant in the room was again ignored. The two biggest contributors to climate change – Russia and China – looked on as the rest of the world jumped through hoops, while they ignored global warming and enjoyed the economic fruits of doing so.

Hypocrisy frustrates people. They hate being lectured at by politicians, who seem keener on grand gestures than simple solutions that would benefit the environment. In reality, given the UK's tiny population on a global scale, nothing it does will affect the rate at which the climate is changing.

This is down to the big players and they are dragging their feet. Change demands sacrifices rather than gestures. We cannot change the environment while having non-seasonal products on supermarket shelves 12 months of the year and we cannot achieve change by signing trade deals that damage local agriculture and drive imports – but that is central to this government's post-Brexit policy.

If we want to see change, it is not about political rhetoric at an Egyptian beach resort, but about getting back to living within our means and ensuring our food supply chains are shorter, with sound environmental credentials.

Farmers are the real custodians of the environment. This can be a by-product of a secure food supply and so the drive to link everything to carbon and the net zero concept is misleading.

New Zealand's meat industry is publicising its calculation of the carbon output of its livestock, and given its extensive systems, it is predictably low and better than other countries. However this issue is much more complex and far beyond carbon.

Anyone living and working in the countryside knows the environment is a complex equation and one that cannot be boiled down to a simplistic number to indicate good and bad.

The issues debated in Egypt were all about the future, but the here and now for farmers is fertiliser cost. The European Commission has grasped this nettle, with a policy document launched this week on the affordability and availability of fertiliser for European farmers.

The background is the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the resulting sanctions against Russian fertilisers. This had seen Egypt become the number one supplier, but it and others cannot match the easy scale and potential Russia represented until a few months ago. Sanctions and gas prices have combined to create a perfect storm around availability and affordability.

This is a prime example of where it is easier to identify the problem than come up with solutions. The EC document warned that availability is linked to food security, with evidence this year that productivity fell because of reduced fertiliser use, although it is hard to separate this from the impact of drought on yields.

It rightly urged member states to make fertiliser production a priority if there are restrictions on gas supplies this winter. Brussels also confirmed it will use the agricultural crisis reserve in the CAP to help alleviate the impact of high fertiliser prices.

Welcome as a new focus on the problem may be, Brussels also inevitably added a green element. It called for more efficient fertiliser use – a suggestion that has angered the European farming lobby.

It countered by saying that farmers do not waste fertiliser and had accepted the need for more precision in farming. It deemed these comments a form of victim shaming – when in reality farmers could not control the weather and other factors that determine fertiliser efficiency.

The report also raised issues around the concentration of ownership of the European fertiliser industry, without saying whether this was abused. As with most EU reports, it offered some solutions for the short term and more dramatic change suggestions for the long term.

It is a report that is easy to criticise but, to its credit, Brussels is at least seeking to identify and tackle the problem while the silence from Westminster is depressing. That silence is another example of green platitudes being easier for politicians to deliver than real policies that underpin an agricultural industry in the UK.