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SNP manifesto is light in detail on agricultural support


By Staff Reporter

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From the Croft by Russell Smith

This is a time for us to pause and draw breath – lambing is over, box feeding is over, shearing is just over the horizon and the grass is finally growing. So we can pick up on a couple of current issues.

Russell Smith.
Russell Smith.

The elections are gone and we have a SNP government again. I searched through their manifesto to see what the future holds for crofters. It is disappointingly light in detail on future agricultural support. I quote: “We remain committed to supporting active farming and food production with direct payments. By 2025, however, we will shift half of all funding for farming and crofting from unconditional to conditional support and there will be targeted outcomes for biodiversity gain and a drive towards low carbon approaches which improve resilience, efficiency and profitability.”

How the conditional half of payments are implemented will be the key issue. We need to be rewarded for the good practices crofters have always followed and not see all the money go to those who have trashed the land in the past and are now rectifying the damage they have caused.

Other stated aims are to stay aligned with EU animal welfare, fertilizer and pesticide standards. Restoring degraded peatlands, doubling the amount of organic produce and increasing woodlands get big mentions but none of this comes with any detail. GM cultivation will continue to be banned. It is not clear how this fits in with the Internal Market Act which allows Westminster to overrule devolved governments on devolved matters such as agriculture. Moves are promised to promote a single Scottish brand “Sustainably Scottish” which will subsume Scotch Lamb and Scotch Beef within it.

Crofting gets a brief but welcome mention “Reform the law and develop crofting to create more active crofts”.

The Scottish Crofting Federation have a meeting with the new Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Islands, Mairi Gougeon, this month and that will give us the opportunity to press the crofters’ case. The new cabinet secretary does have a rural background but is not from a crofting area so there may be a bit of education required.

There are no explicit mentions of LFASS, SUSSS or CAGS in the manifesto – too detailed for this publication perhaps?

You will have read a lot in the papers about a proposed trade deal with Australia (which is touted as a forerunner to deals with New Zealand, Canada and the US). The proposals appear to include tariff and quota free access to the UK market for beef and lamb.

This could be extremely damaging for us. UK farming is clear that we should not allow lower standard produce to be imported at all. If produce to similar standards but from a lower cost producer (maybe through lower labour costs or lower feed costs) is allowed in, then home producers need support or we lose large swathes of agriculture and the communities that depend on crofters and farmers. This could be done by applying tariffs to raise the price of imports to match home produced goods or, if the government wants to pursue a cheap food policy, by direct support to livestock producers so that we can sell our beasts at a lower price and still remain economically viable. No easy answers there.

Russell Smith crofts at Bonar Bridge and is a director of the Scottish Crofting Federation.


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