On a rain-lashed and windswept day in the Welsh valleys, Jonathan Huntley is almost at the end of the busiest six weeks of the year on his hillside farm. Lambing season is over, following the arrival of 1,400 newborns, and one of his 60 suckling cows is calving.
Huntley, 53, farms sheep and cattle in the same 500 acres as his father before him, and he and his wife Tracey hope their 22-year-old son Thomas will take over from them.
“It’s not easy, farming,” said Huntley. “But we’ve been here a long time, made a living, and want to pass it on to the next generation.”
Huntley says he is currently able to make a “comfortable living” from livestock farming, with most of the meat he produces ending up on local supermarket shelves. But he concedes in recent decades the farm has had to “get bigger to stand still”. Now, the prospect of the UK granting open access for Australian cattle ranchers as part of its first post-Brexit trade deal is causing concern for the Huntleys and thousands like them.
From the valleys of Wales to the hills of Scotland, the small family farms which are the lifeblood of many rural communities believe they stand to suffer the most from a UK-Australia free trade arrangement, which trade secretary Liz Truss said she was in a “sprint” to finalise before the G7 summit being hosted in Cornwall in June.
Farmers would accept a larger volume of imports from any deal, but they want the protection offered by some form of permanent quota. They are concerned by briefings last week that the UK will offer Canberra a transition to tariff- and quota-free access after 15 years, saying that would eventually result in cheaply produced food flooding on to the market, and pushing down prices.
Gaining the right to supply much higher volumes of meat and other food to the UK’s 67 million consumers is seen as a no-brainer for Australia. But British farmers are fearful trade would mostly flow in one direction.
Crop and animal production, as well as hunting and related activities, accounted for just 0.6% of the UK’s economic output in 2020. As of December last year, the industry supported 218,000 employee jobs and an additional 129,000 self-employed.
Champions of the industry say farming represents much more than its contribution to gross domestic product, playing a vital role in food security and meeting environmental targets, while also creating the jobs in rural communities essential for the government’s “levelling up” agenda.
Last week, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) assembled agricultural leaders from all four home nations for a press conference to express their concerns. Farmers haven’t been reassured by government promises not to undermine domestic producers in trade talks, or vows to uphold health, environmental, and labour standards.
Beef, lamb and sugar are “sensitive areas of trade” for the UK, according to the NFU president Minette Batters.
Sheep and beef farmers, often located in more remote parts of Scotland and Wales, fear they have the most to lose. They say the UK’s environmental and animal welfare standards make food more expensive to produce. Sugar beet growers in East Anglia and the East Midlands also worry about the impact.
British farmers fear the sheer scale of the Australian industry: farms can have as many as 40,000 cows, compared with what Batters says is an average of 30 in the UK.
Approximately 2.3 million tonnes of beef has been produced annually in Australia in recent years, more than double the 900,000 tonnes produced in the UK. On average, Australia also produces over 700,000 tonnes of sheep meat annually – almost two-and-a-half times the UK output.
“How can our hill farmers compete with the space that is available for the huge farms they have in Australia?” Wales’s first minister, Mark Drakeford, asked last week in a BBC interview. “We are talking here about things which make Wales Wales. That is what is at stake here.”
Traditionally, most of the UK’s beef trade has been with other EU countries. But the sheep meat business is much more global. Britain exports more lamb than it imports, mostly to EU countries including France and Germany. Yet around a third of the sheep meat consumed in the UK is imported, according to the British Meat Processors Association.
Despite the distances involved, the majority of those imports come from New Zealand and Australia, whose southern-hemisphere seasons help to balance fluctuations in domestic supply, allowing retailers to stock lamb all year.
Under EU rules, Australia and New Zealand have been able to supply the UK and Europe with small quantities of lamb and beef as a result of limited tariff-free access. New Zealand has the lion’s share (80%) of the lamb quota, equivalent to more than 228,000 tonnes, which it hasn’t come close to filling for a decade, while the Australian quota is not even a tenth of the size, at 19,000 tonnes. As a result, Australian farmers have tended to export most of their lamb to China, the US and the Middle East. Any lamb exported to the UK and EU in excess of the quota incurs eye-watering tariffs of about 50%, making it uneconomic.
“Agriculture is almost always the biggest issue in trade deals,” said David Henig of the UK Trade Forum.
“Industrial tariffs are very low, practically nonexistent, and services and regulatory issues, which are bigger barriers, are very hard to do anything about because it gets into tricky issues of regulation. So everybody looks at agricultural tariffs. They’re high for a reason, to protect farmers, because it’s deemed sensitive.”
Food producers fear the Australian deal could set a dangerous precedent for trade agreements with large food-producing countries including New Zealand, the US and Brazil.
In Highland Perthshire, sheep and cow farmer Martin Kennedy, the current president of NFU Scotland, worries about the “snowball effect” of several trade deals offering quota-free access to the UK.
“If it does undermine our market, it not only puts farmers’ livelihoods at risk, it puts the environment at risk as well – the socioeconomic values of rural areas,” Kennedy said. “If you don’t have people in agriculture in rural areas, then what else do we have? I know there is a push for rewilding, but do we want just a wilderness?”
The government’s post-Brexit trade negotiations come as it is deciding its domestic farming policy, including what subsidies will replace the EU’s common agricultural policy. Among the initiatives being discussed is a scheme to offer older farmers in England up to £100,000 to retire, to make way for younger people.
Back in Wales, Huntley worries about the global competition his son Tom could face in years to come. He warns that if domestic producers are undermined, UK consumers may find in time that when they try to buy home-grown lamb, they no longer have the choice.
