With a month to go to the general election these are nervous times for politicians.
None will feel there is such a thing as a safe Westminster seat. Even if the polls are pointing to a safe Labour victory, potentially with the biggest majority ever achieved, there is always the danger of peaking too early. Complacency can set in, with politicians taking the result for granted and supporters not coming out to vote because they think it is a done deal.
Between now and polling day there are still lots of potential banana skins lying in wait for politicians. But after 14 years farming, like the rest of industry, will be spending the coming weeks gearing up to deal with a Labour government not reliant on other parties.
If a week is a long time in politics, as claimed, by Harold Wilson, a month is generous and fraught with potential problems. However the fever of election results is just about here for politicians across Europe. Come the early days of next week we will know the results from all 27 member states of the EU the make up of the new European parliament.
These will confirm whether, as many predicted, there will be a surge in support for far right anti-immigration and anti-EU parties. That will decide whether legislative road blocks and chaos lie ahead for Europe. In the run up to the elections there was a limited resurgence of farm protests, but they were by smaller activist groups rather than the mainstream lobby. For now agriculture is doing well in changing EU attitudes and in reshaping the CAP and its green agenda, but action by minority extreme groups could see defeat snatched from the jaws of victory for European farmers.
Away from politics the EU is in the no man’s land created by change halting progress. This will be the case from the results of the European parliament elections to the nomination and confirmation of a new European Commission in October. For now the news coming from Brussels is a mix of good and bad for agriculture. On the positive side Brussels says the drivers of inflation in farm input costs and food prices have eased.
A return to a new normality is here and it says this should ease some of the margin pressure farmers have faced. The EU has also acted to impose new tariffs on arable products from Russia and Belarus, which sends a signal to Moscow that its actions have consequences, while easing criticism about Ukraine’s easy access to EU grain and other markets. The bad news in this equation is that the risk now is from geopolitical events over which the EU has no control.
Those are headlined by Ukraine and the Middle East, but there are other potential flashpoints that pose economic risks and threats to the food supply chain. We live in an over-heated world and saw how quickly the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove the world to an inflationary peak. This makes it ironic that in the election hustings the government is suggesting the fall in UK inflation is down to its management of the economy.
Inflation was global and nothing any individual government did altered the reality that inflationary peaks fall as people cut spending to make personal budgets balance.
On the bad news side the European farming lobby and the EU have been warning of the consequences for the potato industry of a massive blight problem. In some countries this comes on top of weather-driven late planting problems and now blight is threatening yields and driving costs.
This will make potatoes an expensive crop to grow and the big question is whether the market will pay the higher price those extra costs and poorer yields will bring. Food lives in a market of easy substitutes – the switch from minced beef to chicken if the price equation falters and with potatoes the easy switch to rice or pasta. For potato producers this is a constant battle, with younger consumers preferring the simplicity and ease of rice and pasta.
This makes it all the more difficult to convince the market to pay a higher price to reflect higher costs and that will be a big problem for European potato producers this year.
This again proves that in the debate about impacts from climate change farmers have a big skin in the game, because they are front line victims.
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