The Governance of Agriculture in Post-Brexit UK

Irene Antonopoulos, Matt Bell, Aleksandra Čavoški, Ludivine Petetin, Irene Antonopoulos, Matt Bell, Ludivine Petetin, Aleksandra Čavoški

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032207049
• eBook ISBN: 9781000543520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Umwelt- & Energiepolitik

This book provides a multidisciplinary analysis of the impact of Brexit on British agriculture and associated areas, discussing the Common Agricultural Policy and the Agriculture Act 2020.

The Brexit referendum provoked new debates and questions over the future of agriculture in Britain and the potential positive and negative impacts of Brexit on both farmers and consumers. These debates, as well as the ensuing proposals relevant to the Agriculture Act 2020, have exposed the multidimensional effects of Brexit when it comes to agriculture. With a focus on profitability, the rights of farmers, environmental protection, as well as animal welfare, this book brings together an interdisciplinary analysis of the future of British agriculture in post-Brexit Britain. More specifically, it addresses the criticisms over the Common Agriculture Policy, presents an analysis of the Agriculture Act 2020, and considers suggestions for future developments. Through this analysis, the book suggests a way towards the future, with a positive outlook towards a competitive and sustainable agriculture that will satisfy the needs of farmers and consumers while ensuring environmental protection, animal welfare, and rural development.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and agricultural policy and politics, agroecology and rural development, as well as policymakers involved in Britain's post-Brexit environmental policy.

1 Studies of the impact of Brexit on UK agriculture¹

Berkeley Hill

DOI: 10.4324/9781003010852-1

Introduction

Following the June 2016 referendum that produced a majority (though a small one) in favour of the UK leaving the EU (“Brexit”), the formal withdrawal on 31 January 2020 ended several years of uncertainty over this decisive and critical step. It became clear that, by the end of the agreed transition period (31 December 2020), the UK would need to develop its own set of national policies to replace the Common Agricultural Policy (hereinafter “CAP”) and other shared EU policies, and that the two would have to establish a new UK-EU long-term trading relationship. The forms that these were to take were settled only just in time; legislation for domestic agricultural policy (for England) received parliamentary approval in November 2020 (House of Commons Library, 2020), with important details of the trade relationship agreed only on Christmas Eve (24 December 2020) and approved by the UK Parliament only hours before the deadline (HM Government, 2020). Though some details remained to be worked out, the level of uncertainty was far less than had been experienced previously; between the 2016 referendum and the December 2019 General Election, in which the Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson won a substantial majority in the House of Commons, a distinct possibility remained that the whole exit process might be aborted and the UK would stay part of the EU, with its Single Market and trading arrangements, and subject to the CAP. Once the UK had formally left the EU, that status quo could not be restored.

In the five years leading up to Brexit, the prospect of leaving the EU and its CAP raised many concerns. Consumers and their representatives were keen to understand what could happen to food prices and food security. Farmers and horticulturalists and their unions felt that changes could occur that might impact negatively on their livelihoods and viability, at least in some sectors. Firms further along the food chain and those in sectors that provide inputs to farming were anxious to prepare for how they might be affected. Government and politicians were concerned not only with all of these but also with a wide range of other impacts, such as on the UK’s trade balance, its broader economy and the provision of public goods; agriculture is the major user of rural land, so changes in production patterns would be likely to have environmental consequences, with shifts in biodiversity and in landscape appearance. Rural communities could expect to see changes, not only in the level of economic activity and numbers and types of jobs available but also in the human networks found there and related social capital. If farmers and their families were as important to their local society as some proponents believe, especially in the more remote and sparsely populated regions, then Brexit might carry significant social implications necessitating policy responses that extend far beyond agriculture.

At one stage, it appeared that some of the envisaged changes associated with Brexit could be rapid and more in the nature of shocks, testing the resilience of those affected. This applied particularly to what might happen were the UK to “crash out” of the EU without a trading agreement. Following the UK’s formal withdrawal on 31 January 2020, any sudden imposition of new trading rules seemed to have been avoided by UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement. Similarly, fears of an abrupt termination of domestic support to farming were eliminated by the publication by the Conservative Government of their intentions for agricultural policy (in England) and Agriculture Bills that facilitated them (House of Commons Library, 2020). These intentions (discussed later) contained not only a phasing out of direct payments by 2027, as well as other changes and rebalancing of policy, but also assurances in the short term of the level of total support (to the end of this Parliament, assumed to be 2024). Though abrupt changes were avoided, UK agriculture could still be expected to face more cushioned challenges and pressures on incomes that require responses and adaptations, some over a protracted period. Furthermore, the impact of Brexit has to be seen against the background of other long-term structural changes of which many were happening long before the notion of the UK leaving the EU was articulated with any degree of seriousness.

Studies before Brexit

Concerns in the years immediately before the UK’s formal withdrawal from the EU led to many substantial ex-ante studies on the potential impact of Brexit on UK agriculture, produced by and for various organisations, with diverse but often overlapping sets of interests. Over 30 studies were published, mostly between 2015 and 2019, some before and some after the referendum of June 2016. They displayed a diversity of approaches and generated a range of results. Some covered leaving the EU at an economic level or from specific angles, such as the implications for food prices, the availability of seasonal labour, or the stocks of wildlife on farmland. However, many more looked at the implications for the incomes of farms, reflecting the interests of the organisations that generated or commissioned them (farmers unions, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (hereinafter “AHDB”) funded by levies on producers, farm consultant firms, and academics with a track record in this area). Not all contained original quantitative work and, in particular, reports by Parliamentary Select Committees dealing with Brexit often duplicated existing material, though the Committee system allowed for a degree of public scrutiny and follow-up of points of interest. Alongside these studies and reports were comments and analyses on websites by academics, often based on published results.

The role of the UK government was rather curious and perhaps explained by agriculture being a devolved responsibility. The agriculture departments responsible for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland had been clearly unprepared for the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum, with a lot of catching up to do. No official UK-level detailed ex-ante evaluation was issued but, instead, the four agriculture departments contributed to funding a UK modelling exercise by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI-UK) on the impact on markets for farm commodities, with the assessment of the consequential impacts on farm incomes funded by the Economics and Sociology Research Council (ESRC). The studies published before Brexit differed in a number of ways (a tabular presentation can be found in the annex to this chapter).

Coverage and specification of impact factors

In the studies, four main factors were seen to be at work. Not many studies dealt with them all, and some focused on only one. These four main areas were:

1. The shape of post-Brexit domestic agricultural policy, in particular anticipations of what would happen to CAP direct income payments made to farm businesses;
2. The outcome of trade negotiations in the Brexit process that could be expected to impact on market prices received by UK farmers, and which carried implications for trade with the rest of the world;
3. The availability and cost of migrant labour which, because of market linkages, could be expected to also affect the cost of UK labour;
4. Any change in the regulatory burden on farmers as a result of leaving the EU.

Use of scenarios

In the absence of hard evidence at the time on how the four main impact factors would play out in reality, many studies used scenarios to explore the post-Brexit situation. How these scenarios were specified, such as which impact factors were covered, the details of each factor, and the future date to which they were linked, were critical to the outcomes. Rather than second-guess the actual situation that would result when the UK left the EU and its CAP, for which they had no reliable guide, many of the studies used scenarios aimed at illustrating extreme positions (boundary situations), which could then be used to prepare the agricultural industry for best- or worse-case outcomes. Because...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Studies of the impact of Brexit on UK agriculture
• 2 Maintaining high animal welfare standards in the UK
• 3 Setting the path for UK and devolved agriculture
• 4 “Public money for public goods” and property rights
• 5 Agroecology, GM crops, and the post-Brexit regulatory framework
• 6 Brexit and the Common Agricultural Policy: there and back again
• 7 Balancing productivity and the environment for more sustainable farming systems
• 8 The impact of Brexit on epistemic communities in agricultural and environmental sectors
• 9 Legal models for implementing agri-environment policy after Brexit
• 10 Northern Ireland’s agricultural quagmire: how to develop a sustainable agricultural policy?
• Conclusion
• Index