Credit to the European Commission and EU farm ministers for recognising the threat to agriculture and food security from fertiliser prices and availability.

However, while member states see the need to tackle short term issues around supplies and affordability, the commission mindset is still that the solution lies in an ever greener approach.

Farm ministers want bold solutions. They believed there is a case for funding from outside the CAP to help farmers with rising input costs.

A recent report made it clear that half of global food production depended on chemical fertilisers and it also recognised the threat posed by around half of European production still being closed down because it is uneconomic at current high gas prices.

While this needed to be tackled as a priority and farm ministers recognised this, the commission continued to believe the answer lay in a green transition away from reliance on chemical fertilisers.

Farmers had already accepted a case for greater efficiency and precision farming, but there was a knowledge and practicality gulf between the green message and farming reality – not least the impact extreme weather events had on fertiliser efficiency.

Brussels was also making the case for less reliance on imported fertilisers, but given years of dependence on Russia and recent problems around production in Europe, this had to be a long, rather than short term policy priority.

For now, as farm minsters recognised, the name of the game was not rhetoric about what might be possible, but policies that will allow fertiliser to be applied on farms across Europe so that productivity and food security were maintained.

Green aspirations are worthy, but they will not put food on European tables next year. That depended on tackling the issues around fertiliser affordability. If that means more imports in the short term from suppliers other than Russia, that must be part of the plan.

Despite those flaws, Brussels still deserved credit for a focus on the issue – an area where the UK is lacking to the degree of having no policy, no thoughts and no plan to tackle one of the greatest threats to national food security.

Green issues had been to the fore, recently, thanks to the COP 27 event in Egypt. Predictably, after days of debate, money that countries could ill-afford was thrown at the problem.

Inevitably, everyone again ignored the fact that China was doing nothing, despite being responsible for more greenhouse gas production than the rest of the developed world combined.

This green focus, particularly in Europe, is having a bigger impact on agriculture by the day, with issues around food security and affordability coming second to the political imperative of being seen to be green, by worshipping at the alter of net zero.

This is evident in an increasingly hostile attitude towards agrochemicals. These have gone from being seen a generation ago as the road to productivity, to something bad for farming and bad for the environment.

The EU licence for glyphosate has been rolled over for a further 12 months, while more information on the product is awaited from the European Food Safety Authority – but realistically its days are numbered.

This issue had become tied up with a wider plan seeking to ban chemical pesticides by the mid-2030s, although many member states were reluctant to support this because of the threat it posed to the competitive position of European agriculture.

With Brexit, this would have been a golden opportunity for the UK to be different – to finally live up to the promises of 2016 made by those who persuaded many farmers that leaving the EU offered a brighter future.

That has not emerged and it became clear this week that even a hint of accepting EU standards was enough to reawaken the battle in the Conservative Party over Europe that David Cameron sought to end with his ill-conceived Brexit referendum.

If the UK does not want to align with EU standards, it should have had the courage of its convictions and show support for a globally competitive UK farming industry, using all the technology that makes others outside Europe efficient, lower cost producers.

But that would mean pricking the green bubble, meaning it is unlikely to happen with a government still determined to out-green Europe.

On that basis it needs to then explain why it finds it difficult to solve trade problems – and the Northern Ireland protocol issue – by aligning with European food standards it not only wants to maintain, but exceed.