Deputies boost farmers’ fund by £1.35m. a year

The dairy farm management payment system is currently worth just over £1m. a year to the industry, but that will now go up to £2.35m. and be increased annually in line with inflation, restoring at least some of the value it had lost over the past 20 years.

The Environment & Infrastructure Committee claimed that farming faced a bleak future without the increased support it was proposing following an extensive review of the industry.

‘While it is fair to say that everyone has felt the pinch recently, our farmers have been absolutely clobbered,’ said E&I president Lindsay de Sausmarez.

‘In the past few years, agriculture inflation has run many times higher than normal inflation, sending the cost of essentials like feed and fertiliser through the roof, on top of the inherently high costs of farming in the island.

‘Our herd sizes are falling and farm profits, where they exist at all, are too low to inspire the investment we need to sustain the industry long term. The Guernsey cow, known and admired and celebrated around the world, could slowly disappear from its island home, and to me that is just unthinkable.’

Deputy de Sausmarez said that further increases in the price of milk, as an alternative to taxpayers’ support, would merely accelerate declining sales.

The States was facing similar problems 25 years ago, which led to the introduction of the farm management scheme as a way of subsidising the industry and encouraging farmers to look after the island’s countryside.

Jonathan Le Tocq believed that farming remained the best approach to managing the countryside and bemoaned the ‘pathetic’ level of financial support provided by the States. He supported E&I’s proposals, but called them ‘a sticking plaster’. They are due to be reviewed again in 2030.

‘I believe the general public in Guernsey want us to retain our dairy industry,’ said Deputy Le Tocq.

‘If we are to move in this direction, it is going to cost us money, and we have to be realistic about where we’re going to get that money from.’

Not for the first time at this week’s meeting, Rob Prow was quick to suggest a goods and services tax as an additional source of revenue.

‘If you look at jurisdictions where they provide financial support, all of them have a consumption tax,’ said Deputy Prow.

‘In nine years Jersey has collected £1bn. In three years the Isle of Man has collected £1bn. This is perhaps why those two jurisdictions can afford to subsidise these absolutely essential industries.’

The key proposal to increase financial support was backed by 28 votes to three. One of the three, Mark Helyar, led opposition in the debate.

He said he had asked unsuccessfully to see some dairy farmers’ accounts while he was a member of Policy & Resources and believed members of E&I had still not seen them.

‘If you have reached a price point at which people will stop buying a product then adding a subsidy to it is really just doubling down on a loss position,’ said Deputy Helyar.

‘I don’t buy into the environmental stuff either. Grass is a mono-culture. It has no biodiversity benefit of any sort, and neither does spraying thousands of gallons of glyphosate onto the fields in order to kill things off and re-plant them. You can cut a lot of hedges in Guernsey for £1m. a year and plant an awful lot of meadowgrass for the benefit of pollinators.’

Deputy David De Lisle hoped that increasing financial support would encourage farmers to speed up the adoption of ‘regenerative farming methods’ and looked forward to seeing substantial progress over the next five years.

‘It is a matter of going back to the way farming was continued in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, before the impact of massive amounts of fertiliser, chemicals and herbicides,’ he said.

Deputy de Sausmarez told the Assembly that local farmers currently received two-thirds less support than Jersey farmers, five-sixths less than UK farmers, and nine-tenths less than European Union farmers.